My posts have been getting longer, so I’m going to try and keep this one short. Last Thursday we made our way, via trains and buses, to the Italian Riviera. We stayed in La Serra, a tiny village perched on a mountainside above Lerici, in the Goelfo dei Poeti (Gulf of Poets). This is an area, though only 30 km south of the Cinque Terre, that does not see a lot of American tourists – which was great for us (and made for some heavy use of our phrase book). La Serra was celebrating the “Sagre du Lumaga” – a food festival celebrating the lumaga (snails). We ate dinner every night with the locals in the village square. We even tried some snail (albeit in a pasta dish…)! We’ve been swimming everyday on tucked away beaches, hiked 6.5 hours along the mountainside and coast, and took a day trip (via boat) to the Cinque Terre – where we heard more (‘merican) English spoken in one hour than we’ve heard in the past 4 days. The villages are beautiful, but it made us very happy to have found La Serra. We’re sorry to be leaving, but we’re excited for our next stop – Rome!

Now that we have The Sound of Music stuck in your heads… Remember when we said the village we’re staying in can only be reached by two-hour hike or cable car? Well, the tiny konsum (store) in Gspon is closed until the end of October, so we rode the cable car down to Staldenreid to take advantage of the supermarket…and then hiked back up to Gspon. For 2+ hours. At probably a 45-60% grade the entire time, with groceries. Calling it “tough” is putting it lightly. On the bright side, (besides getting our exercise in for the day month) we found a huge patch of wild raspberries that Josh and I returned to on Tuesday; Dorothee and Stephan had gone on a walk in the opposite direction, and, unbeknownst to us, had gathered a whole bag of wild blueberries, so we combined our fruitful (ha!) efforts into a completely hand-made galette (aka pie) for dessert. YUM. Today we took a less strenuous hike via the “Gspon Panoramaweg” (“weg” is like “path”; you figure out the rest), a trail that leads out from the village and then doubles back up to the very top of the mountain for unbelievable views of Gspon and the surrounding Alps, all while being surrounded by nothing but rocks, moss, heather, and the occasional pine tree. We concluded our Alpine tour with traditional Swiss fare in one of the two town restaurants, where the owner joined us for a beer after dinner. For now we say goodbye to la Suisse…but for those of you in the know, I’ll see you in Zurich. ;)

We said goodbye to Provence on Friday – after spending much too short of a time perusing Lourmarin’s Friday market – and spent another long day on the road, driving to the Swiss Alps. We’re staying with Josh’s step-father’s aunt at her chalet in the mountaintop village of Gspon. The village can only be reached by two-hour hike or a tiny cable car! It’s an absolutely amazing place – people have been living up here for hundreds of years, tending their cattle and sheep as they graze for the summer, but it’s still very isolated (thankfully, they do now have Internet…). We’ve been lucky with the weather, blue skies and warm temperatures for the past two days. The area here is indescribably beautiful. Hopefully our photos will do some justice to what we’ve seen. We set a record yesterday, filling an entire 8 GB memory card with photos in only 5 hours- on a hike up and across the mountain, following the ‘waterways’ that provide the mountaintop villages and grazing fields with fresh glacier water. We passed a very remote grazing field where a farmer was tending his cows, all of which have big bells around their necks so they can be found when the inevitable thick fog sets in – what a sound! Today we hiked 6 hours in the other direction, ending above the treeline on a peak overlooking an Alpine lake with views of the Matterhorn. We’ve got rain in the forecast for the next two days, but it might be just as well – I think we’re both pretty overloaded with what we’ve seen over the past few days!

A lot of photos this time!

Wow, we’ve been busy… Wednesday started early(ish) so that we could make it to the weekly market in coastal Cassis. The market is in a beautiful central square, and we both found things that we needed (Josh) and wanted (Meg). Afterwards we spent a couple hours on the pebbly port beach with fantastic views of the surrounding massif (cliffs); thanks to natural offshore cold springs, the water here is surprisingly icy! After a quick stop in a gorgeous cliff-side winery specializing in traditional Cassis white and rosé, we headed back inland with stops in gorgeous Aix-en-Provence, and pretty, quiet Lambesc. Today we rented bikes and rode all over Sud Luberon and Vaucluse, to Cucuron (high on our list of favorite towns), for swimming in the aqua-blue Étang de la Bonde, followed by a winery visit outside Ansouis and a short trip to Lauris after dinner. Our day ended with a pastis and ice cream in Lourmarin. End result: we don’t want to leave; we’ll definitely be back!

We spent Sunday in the car with Josh’s mother and step-father, traveling down to Provence together – a ten-hour drive. Rain in Germany led to beautiful sunshine in southern France. We’re staying at Josh’s aunt and uncle’s wonderful apartment in the town of Lourmarin – a tightly clustered little hamlet that rises out of the dry Luberon landscape. Monday we explored the area – Albert Camus’ gravesite (he’s buried in Lourmarin), 18 holes of rather poorly constructed mini-golf, wine tasting at a lovely local winery, Chateau Constantin-Chevalier, and a picnic dinner aside the town’s 500-year-old castle, Chateau de Lourmarin. Today we drove to Avignon, by way of an amazing string of small hillside towns clinging to foothills of the Alps. We strolled through the former seat of the Vatican for some great sightseeing, but had lunch across the river to avoid the throngs of tourists. In the early evening we drove to Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct and largest Roman ruin after the Colosseum in Rome, with a brief stop before hand for some more wine tasting (this will happen as often as possible) at the hard to find, but well worth it, winery of Domaine de Valseniere. It’s been cloudless and beautiful, the cicadas sing to us all day and all of us are wondering how expensive local real estate is…
Tomorrow we head to the ocean, we’ll write another post(card) at the end of the week!