Looking for somewhere to spend the night before a visit to Marseille the next day to see relatives of Flavio from Alexandria, we found an interesting campsite deep in Chateauneuf-du-Pape country, surrounded by vineyards. As for the whole of the Midi, the ground was very dry and we noticed the soil under the vines was more pebbly and porous.
The grand entrance to the Chateau La Nerthe in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape denomination.
Soil dry and more pebbly than other wine growing regions we’d seen. Does this account for the special quality of the wine?
A lovely friendly and informal campsite, perfect apart from the deafening noise from the cicadas. It really was a loud and never-ending din. The surrounding trees were covered in the ‘shells’ of the cicadas. Amazingly, they live underground for most of their lives, living on sap from roots of trees. They exit the earth, climb the trees, shed their skins go up in the trees, mate, lays eggs and spend the rest of their short lives making maddening noises in campsites! The eggs they lay fall to the ground and once hatched they burrow underground and the cycle goes on.
We put up the hammock given to Flavio as a birthday present by our son Simon and his girlfriend Lucy when we visited them in Indonesia for Christmas and New Year. It was great and Flavio managed to fall asleep in it despite the cicadas!
Discarded cicada shell – there were hundreds of them stuck to the trunks of trees.
Finally trying out the hammock – managed to fall asleep despite the cicadas!
The next morning was Bastille Day and a holiday in France. We bought two bottles of the good stuff and set off for Marseille to visit relatives of Flavio’s not seen for a long time. It was lovely to see Titi (Florence), Christian, his wife Aurelie and the gorgeous twins Ella and Rose after such a long time and we had a wonderful lunch. Surrounding us throughout it all was the memory of Joseph Fares (Zouzou) who was a truly remarkable man and doctor and pillar of Alexandrian society who donated half his time to offering free consultations to poor Egyptians, quite apart from his cultural and other philanthropic work.
We had been to Marseille many years ago (around 1990!) when we travelled down to the south in our old VW beetle where we parked it and took a ferry to Corsica. We decided therefore to skip a further visit of the city and to ‘truck on’ to our next destination a propos of which we were very fortunate to have some very good advice from Christian.
A lovely day spent in Marseille with Titi, Christian, Aurelie and the cute twins Ella and Rose.
Travels with our van 