Saturday, July 17 A drive to Collouire

Collouire beach scene.

The geriatric chorus.

We started off the day by going to the Farmer’s Market in Pezenas. It was great. Everything you need and very fresh and delicious. They even had vats of olive tampenade – black and green, fresh marinated anchovies and octopus, roasted chickens and rabbits. It was pretty crowded and I was sorry I’d taken Angel who got stepped on several times and became completely neurotic.

Afterwards we decided to drive to Collouire – a town on the Med near the border with Spain. I’ve been there many times but I wanted to show it to MaryAnn. The first problem we encountered was a traffic jam on our way back from Pezenaz. I mistakingly got on the new freeway that is under construction and ends abruptly dumping all the traffic into a traffic circle in a little town - Valros. With the weekend traffic this meant that we were going at a snail’s pace for an hour just trying to get home to Abeilhan.
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Even though we’d lost valuable time we decided to go ahead with our plan to drive to Collouire. Unfortunately we hit another similar traffic snarl around Narbonne. We got to Collouire and even got a good parking place – unheard of in the summer. The place does not disappoint – it is a gem. We enjoyed the spectacular scenery and walked around the town.



A “senior” chorus of local folks was giving a concert. They were much more enthusiastic than they were talented. Another odd thing was that there were French military (looked like French “green berets”) hanging out all over town. I will try to find out if there is a base nearby. It looked strange.

We wanted to have dinner in Collouire but it was 5:30 pm and no one was serving food till 7 pm. It was a 2 hour drive back to Abeilhan so we ended up driving back to Adge and having dinner on one of the dinner “barges”. All of the barges have “hawkers” trying to entice you into their place. Since they all looked about the same we picked maybe number 5. The good news was that it was cheap, the bad news was that it was cheap. Dinner cost 14 euros each and with a small carafe of wine for each at 4 euros. Unfortunately was probably worth about 5 euros. The main course – seafood pasta – was lukewarm and had a few overcooked mussels and one “over the hill” shrimp as the seafood ingredient.