L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is a town with a population of about 20,000. It's less than 20 miles east of Avignon and is just a 15 minute drive from our September 2001 gîte in Cavaillon. At L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, the Sorgue river, which is 20 miles long, splits into numerous forks and canals. Those water courses served as defensive features and also carried commercial traffic and powered mills early on. The town is known for its many antique shops. When the weather is fine it's a picturesque place to have a drink or a meal outdoors at a sidewalk café.
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I haven't talked about the weather here in Saint-Aignan for a week or two now. Why? Because it hasn't been very extraordinary, and I'm glad about that. While southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, and even France's Mediterranean coast) has been experiencing intense heat waves, our high temperatures here in the Loire Valley region have been mild and our low temperatures have been on the chilly side. I'm wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved corduroy shirt on my morning walks with the dog and my morning supermarket shopping. Last week we had more than an inch of steady, modeerate rain, which we really needed.
I've been noticing a lot of people wearing shorts and t-shirts at SuperU, which is very close to the Beauval zoo. I'm assuming that they are tourists from other parts of the country and other countries who didn't think the weather would be chilly here at this time of year. But almost every summer we have a spell of cool weather like this, with the exception of the summers of 2021 and 2022, which were extremely hot and dry. In all of July, which ends today, we've had only 5 or 6 days with temperatures close to or slightly above above 90º F.
Plane trees are an indispensable element of Provence’s town squares.
ReplyDeleteAs in Paris
DeleteA lovely town and yes the plane trees add a lot to the atmosphere. My friend Linda is planning to spend some time there at the end of August with some friends.
ReplyDeleteEvelyn
Glad the weather hasn't been extreme in either direction chez vous... I'm sure you both appreciated the nice, steady rain when it came, too.
ReplyDeleteColorful and picturesque scenes today, Ken :)
In my group of francophiles, Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is celebrated for it's large antique marché every Sunday. We enjoyed one Sunday there and I bought espadrilles, a necklace and we found some fruit for our lunch! It was a sunny day and the canals were beautiful. Lots of friendly venders with lots of vintage ephemera, furniture (impossible to take home without spending a fortune!) and many vintage lamps, tables, chairs, etc. to enjoy in person that we've all seen in the movies!
ReplyDeleteL'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue looks great. Love that middle picture there. I know there's a big brocante fair there, but I've never been.
ReplyDeleteIsle-sur-la-Sorgue is indeed lovely. Didn’t it used to have twelve mills on the circular canal around the old town, just like Dutch cities?
ReplyDeleteI stayed there when I went to see Petrarch in Vaucluse (he wasn’t home, but I saw his library).
I didn't know about the 12 mills.
DeleteFor those interested, there are several rivers, all called la Sorgue de … and the name of the place they come from. They all flow into the main Sorgue whose headwaters are in la Fontaine de Vaucluse made famous by the Italian poet Petrarch who is often “referred to as the father of humanism and is considered by many to be the "father of the Renaissance", said Wikipedia.
ReplyDeleteThe Sorgue is a resurgence of a subterranean river nobody knows where it comes from nor how long it is. Complete mystery. La Fontaine de Vaucluse is worth a visit.
So interesting that the river is subterranean and the source unknown.
DeleteThere is something somewhat similar near the Loire at Orléans, the Loiret which runs parallel to the Loire and,eventually, flows into it. The head waters of the Loiret a re in a big hole a few hundred meters from the Loire. With the use of dyes it was found it was an underground branch of the Loire.
DeleteThere's a similar water feature in the town of Tonnerre, near Chablis in Burgundy.
DeleteWalt and I went to see Fontaine-de-Vaucluse in 1993. We didn't get there in 2001. Here's a web page about the village and the river there.
DeleteOui, j’avais oublié Tonnerre.
DeleteLewis and I went to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse in '98. We both enjoyed seeing it and Lewis bought a neat hat there.
ReplyDeleteFontaine-de-Vaucluse was the first thing my daughter wanted to show me when I visited her in Avignon on her Christmas break. Her animatrice had taken a group of students to see this "mysterious river" ! I enjoyed seeing the very old printing paper system and I came home with two prints made from the paper equipment there. I recommend a visit there, too.
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