morning walk

Went up to visit Denise this morning with the girls. She lives 600m up a very steep hill just outside Les Pilles. She owns 5 hectares of mountainous land and lives on a small, spread-out patch of it....in 5 or 6 little houses she has built herself, with help from her son and friend.

She has no hot water or electricity and gets the water she needs from a source and large baths and barrels placed around the land.

She took us on a tour of the little constructions she has built: a bathroom, a workshop/library, a solarium, a meditating hut (which her 13 cats have taken over), a winter bedroom, a donkey house where she now does her collages (she has made about 100!), and the last one is her "sanctuary", where she goes to meditate and to sleep in the summer. What a fairy land of a place. The kids loved it. I have to say she's a brave woman; living up there on her own in the winter must be tough going!

Stopped in Nyons on the way back and had a coffee at the Palmiers with the girls :)

We had lunch back at the house, checked dad's wine production, broke a rotten egg to see how bad it would smell (the answer is bloody awful!) and then tended to Sarah who fell and skinned her wee knees :( Amazing that she ran down that 600m scree-covered track this morning and didn't slip once but then fell on flat, skid-proof ground later in the day! Poor thing.

Circle tonight!