Florac meets hippieville

The following morning, after our night at the hotel in Nimes, we met up with Tris and Anne at Anne's fathers house just outside of Nimes, in Vestric-et-Candiac. They spoiled us with a wonderful breakfast of fresh croissants, fresh fruit, homemade fig jam, huge piping hot cups of hot coffee. We sat outside on the back patio feeling the warm sun on our faces, surrounded by fruit trees, meeting Anne's family ...it was lovely. (Beside our two days in Cadaques, the time spent at Anne's house is one of our favorite parts of our trip.  There is nothing quite like experiencing the local daily life in a foreign country. That is something most tourists just can't get. But we did and it was wonderful.)  We were there to plan the next 24 hours of our trip. Tristan wanted to take us on a drive through the Cevennes which is a national park region. The Cevennes is very beautiful and full of old castles and quaint villages. Dana and I left the planning up to Tristan with some help from Anne and her family.

We had the rental car and so we were sort of just along for the drive....what a drive it turned out to be too. We drove, uhhh, I should say Dana drove, for over 5 hours in one day on a very tiny twisty turny single lane road up in the mountains in a stick shift with five bodies in the car.The scenery was beautiful but the road made it a little stressful at times. We did see some amazing villages that just sprang up, seemingly out of the middle of nowhere. The villages are hundreds of years old, each building made completely out of stone, slate and terracotta. It made us wonder... how in the world did the villagers live so far away from anything and everyone so long ago before cars or modern means of transport? Some villages were so tiny that there were literally only three or four buildings to the entire village. The sign would say 'you are now entering cute little village number 4' and three hundred feet later a sign would say 'thank you for visiting cute little village number 4, please drive safely.'

It was a funny juxtaposition to see this totally cute flower filled stone village full of dredlocked and tie died hippies smoking hash.

About midday during our journey through the Cevennes we stopped in a small town called Florac. Florac is a town of about 2,100 residents, above the town are the towering cliffs of the Causse Mejean which loom nearly 3000 feet overhead. It is a spectacular sight to see and Florac is just too cute for words! It is a great place for camping or to explore the Parc National des Cevennes and the Gorges du Tarn.  In 1878 Robert Louis Stevenson trekked through Florac on his walk through the Cevennes with his donkey Modestine. (you can read all about it in RLS's book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes)

As luck would have it, there was a hippie festival going on the very day we were in Florac. It was a funny juxtaposition to see this totally cute flower filled very old stone village full of dredlocked hippies wearing tie-die clothing, smoking hash.  It all added to our experience of Florac... and we throughly enjoyed listening to the impromptu singing of the song  'Someone's in the kitchen with Dinah' in French by a man with a banjo, wearing a tie died dress with a yellow hard hat on his head...

For lunch we ate a piping hot egg and cheese crepe along with a glass of the local beer. We were surrounded by fun loving hippies and their cute (soooo cute!!) kids with nutella all over their faces. It was a lot of fun but it was getting late and so it was time for us to drive out of town. Florac was a fun experience, and I am sure our memory of Florac will be totally different than most anyone else who has visited this town on any other day.