A few months ago, I received a message from a longtime dear friend and talented photographic contemporary, Nik Strangelove, asking if I knew Pascal Gabriel. He suggested I might like to as we shared electro pulses and pedals as interests and were sort of local to each other. It turned out that Pascal and his wife Pippa Ungar had met Nik at the home of their mutual friend Sandra, the daughter of Irmin Schmidt, the German keyboard player and founding member of the legendary band, Can, which Pascal had worked with. Sandra lives in Arles and friendships collided when Nik was attending the city’s photographic festival—a festival I have long intended to go to but haven’t.
Talk got to music, and then bicycles, and a frequency was uncovered. That was followed by investigation and listening, and my path to Provence was revealed.
Obviously, the thing to take when visiting somebody for dinner in a different region of France is a bottle of your area’s wine. So, I lined up two bottles ready to pack and deliver to Provence: a sparkling blanquette (similar to a Prosecco) from Aude, where we lived until recently, and a bottle of the award-winning local red made at the end of the hillside lane we have moved to in the Pyrénées Orientales.
An hour into the drive east I realized I had left both bottles standing on the kitchen table. But such is the way here in the “deep south” of France that one can buy alcohol at a service station and sure enough both wines were waiting for me at an early stop on the motorway that runs from Spain to Italy. Lined up on the shelves next to the maps and road atlases, they were a Freudian catastrophe waiting to happen no doubt, but for me that day they were a rescue package nonetheless.
Headed east, with the Mediterranean glistening to my right and the Pyrenees shrinking in the rearview mirror, I awaited my first view of the Maritime Alps, as their doorman and cycling storyteller, Mont Ventoux, watches over the posher side of southern France. My first glimpse of the lonely mountain was as usual on the crest of a hill, entering Provence on the motorway. There’s even a sign pointing your eyes off the road to look at the “Géant de Provence.” And there it was, unmistakable on the horizon. It is a special place standing alone with its earned folklore and documented cycling history.
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