A visit to Pont du Gard

For breakfast, we had bread and pastries from our favorite little boulangerie, where madame speaks no English at all.  Luckily, we can just point at what we want, and indicate how many we'd like. I asked her if she had any chouquettes (little puff pastries sprinkled with pearl sugar), and I think she said she only has them for the weekend. Too bad for me, since we'll be gone by then. I'll have to time our next visit accordingly! When it's time to pay for our purchases, we hold out a handful of money and madame very cheerfully helps us count out what we owe. No English is not really a problem.

Inside le Pain Médiéval Boulangerie in Sablet

A major attraction in Provence, and one that we never tire of seeing, is the Pont du Gard. We headed out to see it after breakfast. The drive from Sablet was about an hour, and the weather was warm and sunny. The visitor center has evolved greatly since my first visit 21 years ago. The museum is very informative, and not to be missed, in my opinion.

The Pont du Gard is part of an aqueduct system built in about 1 A.D. In its heyday it was 30 miles long, mostly underground, and it supplied 9 million gallons of water per day to the city of Nîmes. This feat was accomplished by sloping the channel one inch for every 350 feet - for 30 miles. Yikes.

Walking out toward the Gardon river, you get your first view of the magnificent structure. Like a supermodel, it's photogenic from every angle. My favorite view of it is from the hill above, on the opposite side of the river. If you pay extra for a tour of the second level, that's the side you'd enter from also.

A thousand-year-old olive tree near the Pont du Gard

Caterina and Marco with the world's second highest standing Roman structure behind them. The Colosseum in Rome is only 6 feet taller.

A great view of the Pont du Gard from above

The carving looks professionally done. Whatever it says, it's lasted almost 200 hundred years already!

After walking around for a while, we had lunch at the cafeteria there. They had a good selection of choices for lunch, both hot and cold, and none were expensive.

The cash machine in Sablet had been broken for two days, and we were getting low on cash. We hoped there'd be an ATM at the Pont du Gard, but no such luck. One of the disgruntled locals in Sablet told me that there was no ATM in Séguret, the town next door, either. Séguret, as you'll read later, is one of the Plus Beaux Villages de Provence. Beauty trumps practicality, apparently.

Even though we could have stopped in some other town on the way back to Sablet, we decided to go beyond Sablet to Vaison la Romaine to get some cash. We followed the GPS on my phone, and located a machine in town without too much bumbling around. There was a nice gentleman, maybe in his 30s, at the cash machine when we approached. He said he was from Czechoslovakia, and spoke very good English. He invited Marco and Ricardo to go have a beer with him, and when I tried to answer for them, he said he wasn't talking to me! just the men! They couldn't go either though. We were on our way back to our house.

When we got back to the house, we decided to make hamburgers for dinner. We didn't have any ketchup, so I went down to the little general store, and as I was walking out empty-handed, the proprietor asked if he could help me find something. I said I needed ketchup, but not the big bottle they had. He was sorry they didn't have anything smaller. I said maybe I'd go ask Bruno, at the bar, if I could take some. We both laughed. I was just kidding, but the hamburgers we had that night, even with sliced tomatoes and onions, but without ketchup, were below the norm for us. I was kicking myself that we didn't stop at McD's and grab a few packets.

After dinner we watched Russell Crowe in A Good Year, a fun movie with some great shots of Provence.

The church bells ring in Sablet every hour, and then sometimes a few minutes later, and sometimes several minutes later. They start at 7 a.m., but luckily our house has good windows. After a few days we didn't even hear them.