The rain in Sablet is mostly in the house

Our little village of Sablet is an 800-year-old hill town in the part of Provence known as the Vaucluse.  It wasn't possible to park our car right near the house, as the tiny lanes are too narrow.  We were able to find parking within a few minutes of the house.  Our first few days there, as we'd be sitting out on the terrace, Tim and Rick would hop up each time they heard a car going by.  They'd look over the wall, 10 feet below to the street, to see whether the car could squeeze through the narrow lane by our house.  As if it wasn't hard enough to drive through here, to have an audience made it even more stressful, I'm sure!

Our local Tourist Information office also had wine tasting.  Rick and Tim had stopped by there soon after our arrival and said the "tastes" were healthy pours.  Plus, of course, we could get lots of info there too.  It was a nice combination of services for the lucky tourists!

We'd been on the road for almost three weeks by now, and we were exhausted!  We'd had non-stop activities over that time and were looking forward to a little slower pace out in the countryside.

On this day, in the little square in town, they were holding a Marché Aux Puces, or a car boot sale, or a flea market, depending on your nation of origin.  The town was busy with visitors coming in for this activity.  We walked through, but didn't buy a thing.  The one thing I coveted was a huge wine jug covered with a basket. 

I could have carried this home on the plane!

The Marché aux Puces in Sablet

It was laundry day again for us.  At home this activity happens coincidentally with the rest of our lives, but on the road it's a major undertaking.  There's a different machine to figure out each time, and with no dryer, at least a day of hanging clothes on racks around the house to dry.

We were happy to lay low for a day though.  The bakery was open for part of the day and we bought bread for happy hour and pastries for dessert later.  The butcher was open too, and Rick got rabbit for dinner.

When Rick started the dinner prep, he noticed the kidneys were included with the pieces of rabbit we'd purchased.  He decided to fix them as an "amuse bouche".  He sauteed them with onion, garlic, butter and olive oil.  I think most of us are a little skeptical about eating organ meat these days.  We all tentatively had a taste, and when we realized how good they were, ate every last morsel!

For our main course, Rick cooked the rabbit in a mustard sauce, and made some polenta the slow way.  With a salad on the side, we had a great dinner, once again.  Pastries for dessert topped off the meal. 

Little did we know that we shouldn't have wasted a day of good weather hanging around the house. 

At about 5 a.m. we started hearing thunder, and it was booming!  We were all snug in our beds, so not worried about the impending storm.  We were having our coffee and tea in the kitchen about 7 when the torrential rains started.  We started hearing water falling in the other room, like a little waterfall.  It was leaking through a skylight in the hallway.  We raced around gathering buckets and bowls to catch it, and then noticed water running from a ceiling vent down a wall in the sitting area next to the kitchen.  More buckets and bowls were quickly collected.  Water started seeping in under the doors from the terrace into the kitchen and living room.  We tried to stop it with towels and newspaper.  When we checked upstairs water was spraying from a corner of the ceiling in an extra bedroom and had totally flooded the floor of the bedroom and run halfway down the hall.  Luckily the floors of the house were mostly tile, so no ruined wood.

The rain lasted less than an hour, but it was rushing down the streets by the end of it.  We called the caretaker to see if there was anything we should do.  No, she said, there's really nothing you can do about it now!

The rain stopped, and we'd mopped everything up, so we decided to drive to Vaison la Romaine and look for a supermarché. 

We walked around town for a bit and bought sandwiches to eat in the square near the fountain.  I had brought the picnic supplies, of course, but I hadn't rinsed the plastic cups out so I went over to the fountain and swished them around in the water.  It wasn't until later that I noticed pigeons frolicking in the top level of the fountain I'd just used to wash our glasses in.  Yuck!  We all survived, and maybe I should have just kept this bit of info to myself!

Fountain in the square in Vaison la Romaine

We stopped at a tasting room on the edge of town and bought some wine.  We saw a sign over a display of boxes of wine that we'd tasted, and I translated the sign to mean, if you buy 4 boxes of wine you get them for 7 euros each.  Their regular price was 11 euros.  We thought that sounded great.  When we got to the checkstand we discovered that the sign actually said, if you buy 4 boxes of wine at 11 euros each, you get a 7 euro carafe for free.  Geez.  It's those little subtleties that get you in a foreign language!  We're just lucky they didn't send us off with a free puppy!

The wine tasting and fill-your-own bottle area

We picked up some escargot in a can at the grocery store.  For you skeptics, this is a perfectly legitimate way to buy your escargot.  You can buy the shells separately, and then you stuff the shells with the snails, garlic, butter and seasoning and bake them.  But you don't really need the shells.  They're just for show.  So we had escargot, minus the shells, for our appetizer before dinner that night.  Yumm!

Dinner was a simple spaghetti, but you can imagine that chef Rick never buys canned sauce.  He always, always, always makes it from scratch.  My mother would have loved him.

We were pooped after our exciting day of fending off the flood.  Hopefully, tomorrow will be better!