The Brown Knowser

You would think that we drank before we danced. But no, we returned to Avignon on Tuesday, to tour the bridge made famous in song, Pont Saint-Bénezet, better known as La Pont d'Avignon, before we continued up the Rhône region and into one of my favourite French-wine areas. And what do you do when you're on the bridge? You do something that people in Medieval times probably never did: you dance. The legend of the bridge is that in the 12th century, a shepherd named Bénezet was commanded by God to build a bridge across the Rhône River. When he tried to convince officials in Avignon that he was on a divine mission, the authorities demanded that he prove he was doing the work of God by lifting a massive stone, which Bénezet handily achieved. Support was granted for the bridge and in 1185 the nearly one-kilometre expanse was completed. Upon Bénezet's death, a chapel was erected close to the town's gate and the shepherd was interred within. Through confli...

For our last week in France, my family and I rented a farmhouse with some friends on the northern outskirts of Salon-de-Provence, just south-east of Eyguières, off the D17, and along the Ancien Canal de Boigeslin . The access road was rough—pot-holed and hard on suspension—but once you passed a sluice gate, the dirt road would calm down, and you were less than 200 metres from your destination. The farmhouse was a large complex with many living spaces. Two sections were created into guest houses, each with their own private entrances. In the centre, the owners occupied the lion's share of the complex. Though the houses were all part of a single unit, you wouldn't know you had neighbours unless you happened to run into them in the shared pool—which we never did. Horses wandered the pasture closest to our end of the building: gentle and quiet, with hoods over their heads, presumably to protect them from the ravages of flying insects. Their tails swished in irritation from the ...

It had to happen eventually. I'm still going through the photos that I shot while in France. There are hundreds—almost 1,200 to go through. I've been editing them as I've been blogging about my family vacation, but I've run into a snag. My backup hard drive is full. I've been adding photos to this drive since I bought my D-SLR, more than five years ago. And now it's full. It's time to get more storage space: I upload to the cloud but I also like having a drive that doesn't rely on the Internet. So I'll have to go shopping this weekend, so that I can continue telling the story of my vacation, with images. Thank you to everyone who has sent me kind words, who has followed my journey and told me to keep telling it. For Photo Friday, I am putting up the last photo that I edited before I ran out of storage space. I edited this photo, first in colour, then in black and white. I wasn't sure which photo I preferred, so I put it out to my Twit...

We knew that this would be a challenging day: and we were right. We knew that the trip from Beynac to our ultimate destination—a farmhouse on the northern outskirts of Salon-de-Provence—was going to take a huge chunk of our day, but we didn't know it was going to take as long as it ultimately did. We knew that our kids would be pushed to the limits as far as being stuck in a small Renault Captur with food and backpacks stuffed around their feet. And yet, we really wanted to try to drive to Carcassonne and reach the ancient fortified town in time for lunch, to see the fortress, and then to high-tail it and reach our villa/farmhouse in time to have dinner with our friends, who were coming from Germany and spending six days with us. According to Google, the journey to Carcassonne was just over three hours; in reality, it took about five. The highways were packed (with a high number of insane drivers—drivers until then were respectful of the rules of the road)...

Who would have thought that prehistoric France would win my heart. I mean, I've always loved the age of dinosaurs, but early man never grabbed my attention: they dragged their knuckles on the ground, grunted at women, and drew on cave walls. Okay, that's not exactly true, and some men still grunt at women, but it wasn't until I saw the artwork of 17,000 years ago that I really gave our ancestors my attention. On day five of our France road trip, a Wednesday, we packed up our camp in Amboise and headed further south, to the Dordogne Region. It's due east of Bordeaux (no, we didn't visit this famous wine region) toward the centre of France. The hills roll, the roads wind, and the forests are densely packed. This region saw the lines between the English and the French move back and forth over the Hundred Years War. And today, in this very region, you still find a very strong English presence, in the form of tourists. As we approached this region, Lori once ag...