France & Friends: Montpellier

We all met one another exactly 10 years ago in May 2015. Alice, Tammy and I, who did not know one another at the time, took back to back Rick Steves tours of Turkey and Greece. We met Kara and Janet during the Turkey part of the tours and then we met Rosie during the Greece part of the tours. Kara started a WhatsApp group and we’ve all kept in touch with one another in one way of another. 

Janet and Kara, both from California, arrived in Montpellier a few hours after Alice, Tammy, Rosie and I arrived by train from Toulouse. Although I haven’t mentioned it before, Alice is from the state of Washington, Tammy is from Australia and Rosie and I are from Texas. 

You really do meet the most incredible people when you travel. 

 

I love it when I get to drink and talk about wine with friends and then eat a delicious homemade dinner in an idyllic outdoor setting with even more wine.

That’s exactly what we did for our first reunion group tour, the “Pic Saint-Loup wine and food tour” just outside Montpellier. 

Our guide and driver Bertrand picked us just a few minutes walk from our Montpellier hotel and gave us wine lessons on the drive to the Pic Saint-Loup mountain area that gave its name to the wine producing area in the Languedoc region. The Pic Saint-Loup winery vineyards are home to mainly red wines made from the Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre grapes. 

Here’s to the Pic Saint-Loup wines in the Languedoc region, good food, beautiful medieval sites and good friends traveling together. 

I am not a person who experiments with different kinds of food. I’m not even sure how I manage to feed myself in the many countries I’ve visited but I am quite filled out so I do manage to find sustenance. Delicious sustenance at that! 

But one thing I don’t like doing is thinking about food and thankfully not because it is difficult to get but because more often than not, I have no idea what I want to eat. It’s sad really because I have access to just about any kind of food while knowing many do not. My first world problem is nothing in comparison. 

I like taking food walking tours because someone else decides for a few hours what’s on the menu and more often than not, I’ll try it. These kind of tours expose me to both the food and even some of the city’s highlights. And, that was definitely the case for this tour. 

Come help me taste just some of the delicious food that can be found in Montpellier. 

Having already done a food walking tour as a group and seeing some of the city, we spent this sunshine filled day taking a Tourist Information Center tour that took us to some familiar places but more importantly introduced us to places we had not really seen before in Montpellier. 

Today, and on my own, I visited a lavish 19th century Montpellier mansion, and then on the T.I. tour, our group quickly visited inside the Church of Saint-Roch, saw more trompe-l’oeil and street art, visited a medieval mikve, which was a ceremonial Jewish bath, and then we ended our T.I. tour with a climb to the top of the Porte du Peyrou or Gate of Peyrou, also called the Triumphal Arch. 

Come see a little more of Montpellier with me. 

It was a day trip from Montpellier to several villages and sites in the département of the Hérault. France is divided into regions, which are then divided into départements. 

The Hérault area in France refers to the département located in the Occitanie region of southern France. It’s named after the Hérault River, and its prefecture (capital city) is Montpellier.

Just Tammy, Rosie and I did this tour. In the morning and for lunch we enjoyed the nature of the Hérault including the rock formations of the Cirque de Mourèze and the red sandstone of the Salagou Lake for a picnic lunch. 

Then after lunch, we visited the Devil’s Bridge and the village of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. 

Let’s enjoy the beautiful landscape and villages of France’s Hérault département. 

The plan today was for all six of us to go to Sète, just a 20 minute train ride from Montpellier, for most of the day. But I had a full day village tour yesterday and just wanted to relax. I was actually going to cancel the trip when Alice suggested just going for half a day. Don’t know why I didn’t think of that but I was grateful for the suggestion and did just that. 

One of the main reasons to go to Sète is for the seafood and that it’s close to the beaches. It’s also surrounded by water and  dubbed the “Venice of the Languedoc” for its canals. 

I skipped going to the beach with most of the group but I enjoyed our picnic lunch together inside the Halles de Sète market where we all purchased our various seafood dishes and from there went our separate ways. 

After our group lunch, I walked around the small square, down the beautiful Canal Royal and booked a train ticket on the SNCF train App as I made my way to the Sète train station. 

All in all, it turned out to be a beautiful, relaxing day. So glad I went. 

Here’s just a cursory glance of Sète. 

It was only a little more than 14 months that Vincent Van Gogh spent his most artistic and prolific time in Arles creating a multitude of paintings and drawings, many of which are seen as highlights of his works.

And, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to visit Arles again. I did so in 2012 on a day trip with a tour group, but really wanted to follow and see the various locations where Van Gogh would have set up his easel to paint. And, now those places are marked by a steel-and-concrete “easel,” with photos of his final artistic rendering. 

Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter whose career was short but his vibrant palettes and textured brushwork have continued to make his work loved and admired by so many, myself included. Plus, I find the story of his life, his emotional difficulties and physical ailments while trying to find the light and colors for his paintings, deeply heartbreaking and spiritual. 

On a late December night in 1888, Van Gogh, in the throes of a mental breakdown, cut off part of his left ear while in Arles and was admitted to the hospital, returning after a second breakdown in February 1889. He continued to work in Arles for a few more months, but had voluntarily placed himself in the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence mental hospital in May 1889.

But after little more than a year, Van Gogh left the asylum for a short time in Paris before going to Auvers-sur-Oise. It was there in a field near Auvers, on July 27, 1890 that Van Gogh’s shot himself in the chest with a revolver. He died two days later, with his brother and confidante, Theo, by his bedside. However unstable his mental health was, Van Gogh continued to artistically productive. 

Despite his mental and physical health problems and while only working for 10 years – from the age of 27 up until his early demise at 37 – Van Gogh was incredibly prolific. He created approximately 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life.

But by the end of his life, “Vincent was also exhausted from working hard and the high standards he set for himself,” according to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.  “He was uncertain about the future and felt that he had failed, as a man and as an artist. Even though he was, in fact, starting to get recognition for his work.”

Tammy and I decided, with the short time the four of us had in Arles for the day, to seek out as many of the Van Gogh easels as we could. In the end, it turned out to be a fun challenge because the easels were either not present anymore or difficult to find, but in the interim we enjoyed seeing the beauty of Arles’ Roman and medieval monuments while getting a glimpse into what Van Gogh saw and how his artistic, colorful vision of Arles was brought to life on a canvas. 

Here’s to Arles, its historical legacy and most of all to the legacy of Van Gogh’s visions of Arles.

 

I spent an easy and relaxing last full day in Montpellier getting some writing done before enjoying dinner and a walk afterwards as a group of six.

Our reunion group of six…Alice, Tammy, Kara, Janet, Rosie and myself…spent a fun, fast and food-filling 9-days together in Montpelier before Tammy and Kara left to go to their respective homes in Australia and California. We actually all met 10 years ago during back to back Rick Steves tours of Turkey and Greece. Alice, Tammy and I did both tours while Kara and Janet did the Turkey tour and Rosie did the Greece tour. Rosie and I were roomies. 

Here’s to good times, great fun, incredible memories and keeping it together for 10 years while finding common ground in our love of traveling the world with incredible like-minded women. 

While Kara and Tammy returned home, Janet, Alice, Rosie and I moved on to Anncey but not before we all broke bread together last night, said our goodbyes to Montpelier and each other, at least for now.