Provence, Piolenc/Orange, 6.6.2025: Baby Carrots and Rosé Wine

Les Buisses chambres d’hôte, Piolenc, Provence, France

It’s now the 8th and I need to catch up on this travel diary. The past two days have been exceptionally busy and/or ones on which there was no chance to write in this diary, because we were traveling and my computer was packed away.

On the 6th, we left Mulhouse about 9 A.M. expecting a drive of some six-and-a-half hours to Orange in Provence. When W. and K. had word of a stau on the autobahn, however, they decided we’d drive back roads after we had left Switzerland to return to France, and the drive turned out to be more than 11 hours. At times, we were stuck behind vehicles that ambled and limped along, seemingly oblivious of the need of other drivers to get around them on roads that wouldn’t permit passing. The worst of these road hogs was a German r.v. with a drawing of a smiling little carrot on the back and the inscription, Wir lieben unsere Möhrchen. This happened in France on our way to Orange.

Chateau de Bossey, Geneva, Switzerland

We drove to Orange initially by way of Basel and Geneva, stopping for lunch at the Chateau de Bossey outside Geneva. The chateau belongs to the World Council of Churches. According to W., a member of the Rockefeller family bought it, had it renovated, and then presented it to the WCC, which uses it as their study center.

W. and K. had stayed there in the past and on other trips had stopped for lunch at the chateau, and like the food and atmosphere. Since we arrived about a half hour before the food hall opened (the “restaurant” appears to be a WCC operation to feed residents of the study center and guests who drop in to eat), we walked around the beautiful grounds behind the food hall. A large green lawn runs behind the chateau in the direction of the Alps, which can be viewed from the lawn and the outside tables behind the chateau.

When lunch was served, it turned out to be a selection of salads — plain corn in no dressing I could discern, something like a very fine mirepoix of carrots, celery, possibly turnips with a light vinaigrette, three-bean salad, and lettuce and tomato — with three entrée choices: beef en brochette, salmon with a cream sauce, or vegetarian selections featuring pasta and a sort of veggie burger made, it appeared, from cooked lentils and grains.

I chose the latter and found the veggie burger almost inedible. The pasta had no discernible sauce. The salads had dressings so understated as to be tasteless. In short, the meal was not very good, except for a small dessert like a bavarois with a coulis of mixed berries (raspberries, blackberries, possibly red currants) spooned over the layer of congealed whipped cream, with a buttery crumb base. 

I found the whole food-hall, study-center atmosphere daunting and off-putting. As I stood behind K. in line to make my selections from the steam table, where I had seen one man dishing up the choices for those waiting in line, I happened to look to the side and saw another man waiting to serve me, glaring at me because I had paid no attention to him. The man on whom I was focused and to whom K. was talking was dishing up the vegetarian selections, which I wanted to choose, and this is why I had focused on him.

When I saw the other man glaring, I excused myself — in French — with the hostile man making a rude, ungracious reply, and then the second man, who was very nice and spoke English to me, smiling, took my order. I thought he had perhaps seen how his co-worker chose to treat me and wanted to offset the hostility, which was out of place because World Council of Churches, for Christ’s sake!

Switzerland in general, what we could see of it as we drove through from Basel to Geneva: clean, clean, clean, squeaky clean; green; beautiful; sterile-feeling; repressed-feeling. This is probably entirely unfair and wildly stereotypical, but it was hard to avoid the impression, as we drove along, that this country would probably be less than welcoming for any outsider who chose to settle in it, particularly one with a darker complexion.

France, from Geneva to Orange: again, I can only make some impressionistic notes based on what I saw from the car window. As we drove through the Rhône-Alpes, in the vicinity of Grenoble, beautiful groves of walnuts that K. pointed out to us, thickly planted, well-tended trees. As we moved into Provence, vineyards, fields of lavender, olive trees, pomegranates, cherries, figs, attractive old stone houses and villages that begin to have a bit of Spanish feel to them as one moves toward the Spanish border. Many roundabouts have stands of Russian sage planted on them. Initially when I saw it, I thought I might be seeing lavender, then it was clear to me that it was Russian sage. At areas in villages where flowers are planted, it’s prominent, too.

Les Buisses chambres d’hôte, Piolenc, Provence, France

After we finally got to Piolenc outside Orange, where W. had booked rooms for us for the night at a chambres d’hôte establishment, Les Buisses, we were so tired from the long, long drive that we could do little more than shlep our bags to our rooms, then gather food we’d bought along the way and sit outside on the patio eating — baguettes, sausage, cheese, black and green olives, cherries, apricots, pieces of Berawecka we still had from Mulhouse, and some very tasty locally vinted rosé wine we bought from Les Buisses, with a bottle of our own we had bought along the way when we stopped to buy bread and fruit.

Then to bed and a good sleep before we had to get up the next morning for our drive southwest to Saint-Jean-du-Gard in the Cévennes, where W. and K.’s friend A. and his partner X. live.