Well, it was only for one day, but we did have a little excursion down to the coast. The Cotes d’Azure is famous for a reason. I still give a little gasp of surprise as we go over a hill and the Mediterranian Sea comes into view. It has to be one of the most lovely coastlines in the world. Maurice’s sister and her family were staying in a family resort type place, rather like Club Med I imagine, but more simple.  After lunch we took a boat to an island to walk around.

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As you can see, the name of the Island is Porquerolles. I had never heard of it either. It is near the city of Hyeres, also unknown to me until I moved to this region. There are no cars allowed on the island although the hotels had a few. Mostly there were tourists and tourists on bikes.

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 Not your normal taxi

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This is the “beach”. Many of the beaches are rocky like this, although there were a couple of places with sand here.

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 A view of one end of the beach. This is the wide part. At one area there was barely enough room to walk by the people lying on their towels, catching the sun.

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The island is covered with the parasol pine tree. I love their shapes. We have three in our yard but they won’t be looking like this for a hundred years or so.

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 A view of the sea a little inland. I did some sort of rookie mistake and there is a dark shadow on the top left of the photo as I must have held something in my hand that entered the lens.

 So we had a great time. Maurice’s sister is alot of fun and, interestingly, she is one of those French women who don’t get fat but she eats with alot of control having no wine, skipping the salad and cheese and only having a small amount of dessert. Her two grown daughters were there and totally blew away the theory that French women don’t get fat. They were very Rubinesque, and voluptuous. I fit somewhere in the middle, rather on the road to being “juicy” myself.