Day 6 Moustiers-Sainte-Marie to Riez

Recounting our 2002 journey, a 6 day walk from Saint-André-les-Alpes to Riez in Southern France...

Day 6
Sept 24, 2002

Our hotel Le Relais gave us again the best breakfast we a have had on this trip--yogurt, bananas, apricots, breads, toasts, jams, corn flakes, cheese, ham, croissants etc...no wonder we stayed two days!

After breakfast we bought items for a lunch and headed out of town at about 9:15.

Very soon we started a long gradual climb that led us up onto the vast Valensole Plateau, walking past lavender fields, no longer in bloom, as the sun blazed high in the sky.

A look back at Lac de Sainte-Croix and the mouth of the Verdon Gorge.  The high ridge is the one we followed from La Palud to Moustiers-Sainte-Marie two days before.

All in all in was a pretty ordinary day, unlike some of the previous days.  We stopped for coffee in the tiny village of Roumoules and then it was on to Riez, arriving in the late afternoon.  We found a hotel, The Claria and Dave and Dianne bathed and snoozed, while Cheryl and I checked out the town.  There are some remarkable Roman columns in a small park, the remains of a temple erected in the 1st century A.D.  The town has an attractive old town centre with narrow winding streets and pastel painted houses.


We bought some cheese and wine, which we enjoyed on our patio and then roused Dave and Dianne and took them down to admire the Roman columns.  We had an early dinner of pizza at the hotel next door and then it was early to bed.  We had to catch an early 6am bus in the morning to Aix-en-Provence and then train to Paris for our flight home.

This marked the end of another fun adventure exploring a small corner of Provence and we went home fulfilled from this trip, but looking forward to where the trail would lead us next time.