We set out intending to see the Gorges du Verdon on the way; and the man in the Préjoly advised us to drive north as far as Castellane and take the road across from there so that we'd be following the gorges along. It was good advice - without it, we'd have missed Castellane, one of the nicest stops on the whole trip.
The road from Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey took us quickly into dramatic chalky-looking cliffs, with low cloud just beginning to lift. This first part was quite dramatic, but the hills became more rolling as we went on. It got particularly dramatic again when we got our first glimpse of Castellane from a hillside overlooking the valley - we could see the distinctive outcropping that towers over the town, and the tiny toy chapel perched on top of it.
I was instantly seized with the desire to climb up to the top and the anxiety that we might not do it and that my life would thus be forever incomplete. Happily I was saved from that fate. The path up (like other chapel-topped hills in the area, as I discovered later in the journey) was marked at intervals with the Stations of the Cross. The chapel at the top was full of placards thanking Our Lady of the Rock for everything imaginable - bringing back lost people, saving the town of Castellane from cholera and influenza, and so on. This is one of the strangest things about religion for me. The next town loses dozens of residents through sickness, and yours doesn't - so, it's because they didn't pray as hard, or don't have their own special protector? It seems somewhat hubristic. Anyway, if your protector is so reliable and effective, shouldn't you have prayed to them to save all of the people in the next town too... and even further afield? Did those people die because you didn't care enough to mention them? And if you invoke protection by your town goes down with cholera anyway, should you consider yourselves to be in deep disfavor, or abandoned, or... wrong? No, you presumably pray harder because your mind is only open to things that seem to support the view you've already fixed upon. It's an odd system. But it helps maintain some nice chapels, I suppose.
Here's the view of the town from above:
And the outcropping cropping out...
And the bridge bridging, with a view back to where we'd come from:
We didn't stay in the town for long - just a quick walk through and a visit to the boulangerie and minimarket to get some lunch materials, which we ate by the side of the road after we'd driven on for a while. It was a nice town, though - and it seemed to have some balance between normal town and tourist destination.
From Castellane we turned westward and started along the Gorges du Verdon. Many beautiful views, indeed, but this is where we started to make such slow progress on the map that we began to doubt making it to Goult before nightfall. This was the most dramatic view, at the Point Sublime:
We stopped briefly at Moustiers Ste. Marie, famous for its pottery, and a town clearly worth spending a little time in (at the same time, clearly a town with no tourism/normality balance at all). Unfortunately we were too tired and anxious by this time, so we merely glanced at it, grabbed a couple of highly expensive drinks and went on our way.
The rest of the drive was easier, however, and we made it to Goult before dinner. After searching in vain for our hotel for some time, we discovered that it was actually in Lumières, a hamlet attached to the village. It was the Hôtellerie Notre Dame de Lumières, which is on the grounds of a former convent, and still attached to a "sanctuary" that now belongs to some missionary sect. The hotel was great - the room (in an annex) was quite small but very clean and modern; the grounds were extensive, with an outdoor pool and a tiny chapel up a hill (complete with Stations, of course) where I communed with bats on the second evening. It had more of an air of a resort than a standard hotel, and it had the best breakfast of the trip, a sumptuous buffet with multiple mini pastries, brioche, bowls of yoghurt and conserves, and even moon cheese (well, a mysterious kind of cheese with a yellow-green flaky rind. I have no idea what it was really called).
