Once I did a 3-4 week bike ride. Kind of a lonesome trip all by myself from Geneve to the Carmarque. It was about 1986-88 in August and September. I had a totally overloaden bicycle, equiped with a sleeping bag, some essential clothes - but not too much, so I must have smelled like a puma - and water colors, plus wine. I ate lotsa cheese and bread and drank cheapo redwine. I was kind of slow and looked around a lot, taking too much time to decide what to paint, since every 2 miles or so I found the perfect vista. The images of the trip are fading a bit but the trip but left are some watercolors.

I was sweating uphill and after it had been kind of cold for some days, the down-hill  ride began south of Grenoble. It was there where I first got the feeling of  the amazing landscape of Provence.  Hot dry air, loud crickets everywhere and lots of little huts that seem a desolate and pleasant at the same time. They were probably empty shelters. One could live on walnuts that were everywhere. 

During the trip, many pictures never got finished, like the one below. The rain settled in, or I just got hungry or simply bored and gave up. I got a few more and hope to add them here after scanning them all in. Just keep on scrolling down...

Above: Grenoble, la Bastille is seen to the right with the gondolas. In Genoble I spent the night sleeping in a sleeping bag just right in a socker stadium. A lousy night. I just arrived too late and couldn't find a cheap hotel anymore. I left Grenoble, and just a little south from there it may have  looked like this:

Mount Ventoux, the wind mountain. It's often in the haze and seems to be the origin of large thunderclouds. This area is really provencal.

And here, Nyons:

Nyons. It's a pleasant little town with a very old bridge. I went slower after this and hung around both in Nyons and Vaison la Romaine:

Vaison la Romaine. It is a bit of a tourist town and I liked it. There are some interesting Roman ruins to be seen but this is not one of them. I was already going hardly more than 15 km a day, drank more wine and ate more cheese.  When finally leaving the area I found a nice little lavender field, so here is my contribution to the pile of estimated 10,000,0000 photos and paintings of lavender that must exist around the planet.

but you can't paint the smell.

This is some mideaval town in Provence, La Beguede de Mansenc or something like that. Romantique but also somewhat sinistre. Just imagine you have to work all year long in the vinyards for the lords in the castle, or your are there escaping the inquisition....

An interesting spot to visit is la Fontain de Vaucluse, the largest fountain of Europe at the foot of a big vertical cliff. This is what it looks like when the water is missing:

 

Heading further south, it's getting hotter, and my views sometimes got more pale. Too much sun, you know, too low blood sugar levels...

or too much redwine:

Later I found also the picture above again: Saumon de Vaucluse by night as seen from a small hostel from across a valley. Looks like with redwine things become darker or more brilliant... That hostel was very nice. They served 5 types of excellent jam with croissants for breakfast and a huge coffee au lait. Now that was more than 12-14 years ago and I don't recall the name.

Closer to Marseille, being on a bike among crazy drivers evokes some shocking emotions:

 Oil and streets and trains, and everywhere road kill, biker be aware!

Actually Marseilles is a great city. Biking through this, I decided to avoid it all together, which in the aftermath was wrong. As I later found out,  Marseilles doesn't have the high-browedness of Aix en Provence, where the actual hiers of Cezanne, the great-great children or so, behaved a bit too self agrandizing at the museum of Cezanne studio: They charged way too much. So I did my own riding of the wave of Cezanne:

Et voila, a 100,000 F picture:

Does this look familliar? If only so, it's Cezanne's famous Mount Saint-Victoire near Aix-en-Provence. Paul's pictures are truly unreached.

En route to Carmaque I came through some nice harbor towns by the mediterranean sea. Some harbors weren't all that romantic though:

Harbor of .. Martique?. Maybe. Was a lousy day.

 

Torros in the Carmarque. This was done just from memory since I couldn't stop the bike racing back to the north. It got dark and darker and mosquitos where attacking me whenever I slowed down and the wind stopped.

The Carmarque region is first of a all a huge swampy habitat, almost subtropical with a very particular flora and fauna. It's known to have the only flamingos of Europe, and wild horses and torros.  Here one can also find salines and the strange consequences for the vegetation, as shown below. However, some of the red in the picture was certainly my own blood, from squeezed mosquitos that were very thirsty for blood and the water on the picture.