Monday, September 30, 2002

    E rose early, even before Duncan's borrowed alarm clock went off. Her flight wasn't until 1 p.m., but having never driven back to Montpellier, she wanted to allow for plenty of time. We saw her off at 9:30.
    Meanwhile, we were expecting Terry to fix the washing machine. After a week of wrestling with it, and having one load come out spotted with big stains of undissolved soap, B finally announced that as far as he was concerned, we weren't just using it incorrectly, it was broken. "It's not spinning," he said. "It's not, you know, agitating. It fills up and empties, I can hear it doing that, but in between it just sits and whines. It doesn't shake or anything." I don't remember which morning it was, either yesterday or Saturday, that B called Terry and explained it to him. B reported, "I told him I thought it wasn't spinning. He immediately said, 'Well, the belt's broken, innit?' No hesitation. I wonder if he knows that already?"
    B is not fond of our poor host, who has treated us somewhat peremptorily. Not at all like the Rossi's in Italy! To be fair, Terry has told us that his wife Marina, who we expect is the brains behind the operation, is in the hospital for a hip replacement. So Terry is obviously on the run. It's too bad, and has made a bit, but not much really, of bother for us. B takes it harder than I do, as he wants to go, go go. I don't remember when it was, but I remember very well him saying to E here on the terrace, "When we go on a trip like this, I just want to see everything, eat this eat that eat the other thing, do everything." Sometimes I need to slow down to be able to appreciate our surroundings. He soaks it all in like a sponge, noticing all the details, remembering where we are in town, how to get around. And resenting interruptions!
    We also left a note for Terry about the shower disaster: water running over the tile ledge, down to the floor, and leaking through the ceiling! Then off to hunt for dolmens and menhirs, a kind of side trip into Driving the Stone Age. We used Bruno Marc's book that we bought in Montpellier. The Brit guide at Cambous, to whom we mentioned Bruno, warned us that while Bruno's book is the most, indeed the only, comprehensive book there is, his directions are uneven.
    So true! Only through perseverance and grinding analysis of French directions did we find a few from one chapter of his book! We started in, of all places, St. Martin de Londres. We had picked out a Bruno drive that was close to us, and seemed to include some good sites, and it could be begun from very near St. M. B needed cigarettes, and wanted to try to find a map. He had learned through his research back home that there are French maps similar to the ones we used in Scotland. We stopped at a tabac on the bustling square for the cigarettes, and when he emerged B was waving a Blue Series map: the most detailed maps available, which might show the locations of some of the sites we would be visiting. It turned out to be helpful.
    We saw Le Dolmen de Ferriers, not easy to find. Bruno said that it was beside a farm lane, which with his directions and the blue map we found easily enough. But right away we saw what the Brit Guide of Cambous had been intimating. Bruno's directions also said that it was behind a screen of trees. Well, the whole hillside we were walking along was covered with trees! Not very specific. B had the idea that we should at least look for paths into the woods. We walked along the lane, exploring now and then, without success. Eventually we were sure we had gone too far. On our way back, I noticed what I thought was a fairly good path going up the hill, kind of backwards to the way down the lane. I explored up that way and found it. A very nice partially reconstructed site.
    The dolmen du Capuchin was a bust. We asked directions at the farm, and are certain we found its location on a hill far from the road, but decided not to bushwhack through the garrigue over to it. We drove right past La Grand Menhir de Jouilles, but finally, through sheer pigheadedness, found it, just a few feet off the road but obscured by trees. It's quite tall and was broken in two parts but cemented together again. Someone had spray painted graffiti on its roadside face. We think that Bruno was telling us that a nearby depression was the site of its quarrying.
    The least impressive site was a stone lying right by the road. Just after the Grand Menhir was Jouilles, an abandoned town. B toyed with the idea of trying to get into it, but the lane was fenced off and time was pressing. An odd sight, though.
    The oddest search was for a dolmen we never found. We were sure, using the blue series map, that we had found the place. A farm lane led along a fenced field. At the beginning of the walk was a very elaborate sign, something about no hunting, danger. But we walked back much further than we felt we should have had to, with no sign of the dolmen. We stopped to eat car lunch there, when we got back from our fruitless trek. A nicely dressed man was sitting in a car, talking on a cell phone. We had a moment of apprehension. Was he concerned about our trespassing? We sat on a stone to eat our lunch of bread and cheese and olives, but he paid no attention and eventually we drove off to our next site.
    This was the most impressive site yet, the dolmen de Lamalou. The site was well marked on the blue map as a national monument, but as with all the others, there were no road signs to mark it. Since there were several farmhouses nearby, we felt we should ask permission before just setting out up the stream that would lead us to the dolmen. We drove up a little lane and asked directions and permission from an elderly lady who leaned out an upper window at B's knock. We understood her to say that her place wasn't Lamalou; she waved her arm as if we were to go further on the road. B looked again at the blue map, and sure enough, we hadn't seen that another farm was indeed named Lamalou! We drove around the bend in the road and up the lane to Lamalou, which was across the stream from the alleged dolmen site. A very helpful lady came out of a barn at our approach, and willingly gave us permission. B understood her to say that we would have to cross the stream, it was wet in places, and that the dolmen was more or less under "the electric line." Of course all these conversations were in French, with B doing a pretty good job of asking and replying.
    We drove back to the good parking spot along the road, beside the stream that came down the hill. According to the map, if we just followed the stream up the hill, we'd come to the dolmen. It didn't seem that we would have to cross water anywhere. But our farm wife guide was right. There were two places where little streams came along from the right, and we had to step across them on stones as we followed the larger stream uphill. It was good that we had gotten the hint about the electric lines, for the hillside was a jumble of piles of stones, much like those around Cambous. We found no paths, but soon came to the electric lines running along the hillside. We cast about, and I found it—a huge heap of stones, a chamber big enough to walk in, a low entrance and a window higher up. Well worth the search.
    All of this took a long time, and we were flagging a bit as we left pretty Lamalou. So we decided to begin a new search, for a red guide auberge restaurant back near St. Martin, ten km south, sort of. Well, that was a Wonder Tour! We seemed to be doing well at first, but eventually got bogged down at the intersections of roads D127, D127E and something else! We wandered around a town with roadwork detours for 15 minutes. It was hopeless. We gave up and stopped to phone La Source, a restaurant in Villeneuvette, not far from Peret, which turned out to be very nice. That also gave us time to come home, freshen up, and put on evening clothes for going out.
    We ate in a cavernous old room with interesting stone work, arches meeting low overhead. It seemed like an enormous amount of work to me, just to build a barn or wine cave or whatever it had been.
    "Well, yeah," said B, "It's a lot of work, but look. The stonework's actually pretty sloppy. The mortar's all uneven, it's really rough. They had plenty of stones, they didn't try to shape them, they just threw it up. They got the arches right, they knew how to set that up to hold the weight just right. Who knows how many of these places collapsed before that was figured out? I mean, they put the effort into what was absolutely necessary, and let the rest slide a bit. And they had a barn that'd last for hundreds of years. That's pretty efficient, actually."
    The family eating next to us had their baby girl with them. Father was taking gas, he was embarrassed at all the fussing and fooling around. Mother and Aunt and Grandmother took turns walking Baby, trying to keep her quiet. Good luck, with a tired and keyed up toddler! This was the restaurant with the skinny blonde hostess, doubling as a waitress, who was pleasant, but clearly not into food. There was also a champagne blonde poodle in the lobby that growled at me when I woke her up. Some other people stood up to go, and a huge shepherd dog stood up with them! We hadn't even seen her sleeping quietly on the floor behind their table. That dog behaved much better than did Baby! We laughed about that. We too were both exhausted by the end of supper, and came home to find a note from Terry—installing new washer tomorrow. Hmmph.

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