If you like observing the type of wildlife that doesn't involve alcohol consumed in dark bars, there's another reason to head for Europe in the cooler months--mating season (not for pink elephants or humans--that would be wrong--but for pink flamingos).

The best time to see flamingos according to experts is during their reproduction process. Oui, mating season! When is that? In the Camargue, it is recommended to see the flamingos during the winter months, any time between November and March. However, THE most ideal time to visit is actually in January and February according to the Parc Ornithologigue, (where we saw the flamingos) just 4 kilometers from the center of Saintes Maries. 10,000 flamingo couples gather around to do their thing.

The above quoted passage is part of a very interesting and comprehensive blog post called The Best Time to See Pink Flamingos in the Camargue, recommended reading on this fascinating part of the south of France.

It was rather spectacular to watch the flamingos in early November though. Here's a link to a short Camargue Pink Flamingo Video I made while we were there.

Everyone who's been to Europe laments the incredible percentage of monuments covered in scaffolding. With my tongue firmly in cheek I long ago uncovered the Office of Tourist Distractions which is responsible for such inconveniences.

Ok, so here's the bad news: The Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela is undergoing some restoration work. Some of the Cathedral is covered in scaffolding, including the 12th century Portico of Glory (picture) .

The good news is that if you're at least 12 years old and wear sturdy shoes you can don a hard hat and crawl around the scaffolding to see how the work is going. Yes, they've taken disappointed tourists complaints to heart and are offering a free Portico of Glory Tour.

Read more from Newsweek: In Spain, Tourists on the Scaffolding

The village of Lourmarin makes an excellent base from which to explore the Luberon region of Provence. Surrounded by vineyards and olive groves and sporting a castle with Renaissance additions--including a stone carved winding stairway that will amaze you--you can probably spend a week just exploring the local scene. There are enough restaurants within walking distance that you probably wouldn't have to go to the same one for dinner twice in a week.

I've selected a dozen pictures that should give you an idea of what to expect in the village of Lourmarin, see: Lourmarin Pictures.

Spices in Aix-en-Provence open air market picture © 2009 by James Martin, licensed to About.com

Evidently an ice skater reported it in 2006, but recent reports say that carbon dating makes the shipwreck a 14th century disaster.

The boat was located near Reichenau Island, known for its medieval monasteries and vegetables and one of the most interesting places we've visited so far on our fall trip. Read more about Reichenau Island and Lake Constance.

The six hour drive from sunny Provence to rainy northern Tuscany gave us a lot of time to contemplate what we liked about each place. Both tourist destinations have attracted artists to their unique landscapes, landscapes that aren't entirely natural but modified by humans in a manner to make the whole even more pleasing to the eye.

The ochre formations on the Rousillon Ochre Trail, for example, are the result not only of natural actions occurring in the past 100,000 years or so, but also of the recent mining and erosion that has sculpted the amazing formations you see on the left.

Provence holds claim to the unique quality of its light and the colors that have inspired artists and architects to work and experiment within its territory. I will do an entire photo gallery on the colors of Provence in the near future because they can be startling at times. If you open your eyes and mind, it can dazzle your sensibilities and if conditions are just right, you might get that feeling of truly seeing things for the first time. I filled an entire hard drive with pictures. Provence is an inspiring place for the visually oriented.

What's more, Provence has inspired artists of fairly recent vintage, creating a link from the recent past to the present. It's heartening to see artists move into beautiful towns abandoned because their defensive locations made them inconvenient for modern life. Artists and craftspeople vie with tourism in the fantastic old city of Oppède Le Vieux, breathing life into a place in a way that busloads of bored tourists never could. November was the perfect month to see this fabulous old city the way it wants to be seen. Pack a leather jacket and go.

Just a couple of travel notes and acknowledgments. First, if you're driving from southern France to Italy, stop at the last Aire or rest stop on the French Autoroute. The views to the sea are spectacular. The sandwiches suck. If you're hungry, wait and stop at an Autogrill in Italy where they put your panino in a real press instead of the microwave (!).

We stayed at an apartment on the edge of the old town of Lourmarin called La Petite Rive. The owners are very helpful and maintain a wealth of information on the Luberon and Provence in the apartment. They've also added helpful comments to these blog posts. The day trips we took were made infinitely easier following the accurate, hand-drawn maps and instructions provided by Bob and Sue Winn in their incredible Luberon and Provence Guide. Expensive, self-published guide, but very, very valuable to the passionate tourist who doesn't have time to drive in endless circles.

We didn't see a tenth of what Provence has to offer in our one week excursion. Give it time. A couple days isn't enough. Rent a place for a week or more. Trust me, you won't get bored.

For me, the true appeal of a place is determined when you're starting to pack up and thinking of moving on. When I'm not anxious to get home, that's the sign for me that a place has taken hold of me. The Luberon was just such a place.

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Provence Day by Day Index

• Day 1 - Lourmarin, Bonnieux, Saignon, Lacoste
• Day 2 - Cucuron, Menerbes, Oppède Le Vieux
• Day 3 - The Carmague (More on The Carmague)
• Day 4 - Roussillon and the Ocre Trail, Lacoste
• Day 5 - Loumarin, the Open-Air Market and Aioli
• Day 6 - Aix-en-Provence and Incompetent Waiters
• Day 7 - The Wrap: Seeing the Light

Resources

Provence Pictures illustrating these blogs

Lourmarin Pictures

The Provence Post - Blog with news of Provence

The Luberon Experience - Cultural experience tours out of Bonnieux. Owner Kathy Wood recommends, "To find villages where few tourists go, head beyond Apt to the Grand Luberon. To the north of the N100 (now the D100) there are a number of villages (Caseneuve, St. Martin de Castillon, Reillane) with no
tourist shops, buses, busy markets...and perhaps not the same views, but beautiful and interesting
places where real people live."

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Today we drove the little back roads to the big city called Aix-en-Provence. Aix has been on and off the tourist's radar for years. It was big in the 70s, then demand for it declined. Now travel writers are once again extolling its virtues.

The problem with Aix is that there are no Roman columns poking through the pavement like extraordinarily hardy asparagus stalks to gawk at; there are no world class museums and but a single cathedral of interest. It is called "the city of 1000 fountains" but we didn't see nearly that many. The fact is, what's interesting about Aix is that it's a city totally devoted to the movement and pleasure of people. The fountains are indicative of that. The Cours Mirabeau, for example, might remind you of the Champs-Élysées in Paris. It's planted with double rows of plane trees in the center, where you can walk in shade, and bordered by architecturally interesting houses and fountains and lined with restaurants and cafes. It's as if someone took absolute care to make the city a place pleasant for hanging around in. That's just not done any more. Enjoy Aix for what it is. It's a place you might really want to live in.

Saturday is market day in Aix. Be prepared, because it's one of those gigantic markets that takes up most of the older core of the city. If you have made it a point to visit one market on your European vacation, make it this one. It's worth it for the fish stalls alone--but it's fall, and so the mushrooms are out and will take center stage here. Look at the size of the one being displayed on the left (click to see it bigger).

I don't think you'll find a place more interested in adding flavors to olives than Provence. Sure, you'll find olives in Italian markets, but the variety will consist mainly of different types of olives rather than different marinade treatments. Here there are long tables chock full of all manner of olives, flavored and natural. If you're into color, the spice vendors have stalls that will dazzle your senses too.

Aix is also known for the high quality of its restaurants. After amusing the vendors with our picture taking we headed for one that was filling up fast on the edge of the food section of the market. La Mado. Remember that name.

We asked for a table for two. The maitre d' inquired if we had reserved. Nope. Well, would we accept a table upstairs? Sure. Why not?

Well, because that's evidently where they imprison the incompetent fools looking for all the world like waiters, for one thing. Honestly, if incompetence was a turkey, we were about to have Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings.

I mean the minute we sat down we knew we were in trouble when the "waiter" brought the man next to us a beautifully prepared duck leg. The customer looked surprised. Finally he asked, "THIS is my FISH?"

There was a small disagreement. The dish went away. There was more disagreement. The dish came back. The man shrugged and ate the duck.

In the mean time Martha, having seen the oysterman shucking away out front, had a desire for bivalves--so she ordered six from Breton to slurp down before the plat du jour, which happened to be the duck that looked mighty good next to us served as a fish course. It took the oysters quite a while to arrive. It took the rest an hour longer.

While we were waiting I amused myself by watching other diners. One group ordered a big platter of oysters and it wasn't right. So the platter disappeared and eventually returned. Then, after 5 minutes, the folks at the table started frantically waving their arms as if their team had scored a goal in a tight soccer game. After getting the attention of the "waiter" it only took them another 5 minutes to get bread and implements to eat with. Shortly thereafter the waiter brought the wine, discussing it with the table for a number of minutes before returning it to the ice bucket and leaving. After a bit of discussion, a woman sitting at the table began to offer the wine to her friends, holding the bottle aloft in the universal "do you want some of this?" pose. Everyone wanted wine--trouble was, it hadn't been uncorked yet.

Every table had a story. The people on the other side of us seemed very nice; they took the mistakes in service in stride. In fact, they laughed it all away. When two dishes were put in front of us, only one was what we ordered--in reality, those two dishes were for the laid back folks. Martha realized there might be some problem, but stuck her fork quickly into her duck because she was really hungry and annoyed and didn't want it taken away. Whatever they put in front of me was taken away and given to someone else. Then my fish came (real fish) but I didn't have silverware. Nobody noticed, so Martha asked the laid back folks if we could have the extra place setting from their table and they kindly gave it to us.

But by the time the last plate came to their table, they didn't have enough silverware to go around either.

I will cut this short by saying we were charged €12 for a tiny pitcher of white country wine that was on the menu for €4. Luckily, as it turns out, they couldn't change it because they used these high-tech touch screen personal assistants that seemed to need lots of tapping with a stylus to get them to register your order (holstered yet!) so they ended up giving us the wine for free. It wasn't worth it, believe me.

Honestly, I could go on and on. It's hard to believe that this much wait staff incompetence could ever gather in one place.

Don't ever accept a table on the first floor of La Mado at 4 Places des Precheurs in Aix. I'm telling you this for your own good. (The food was decent though.)

I leave you with an image from the last town we visited today. It's the town of Lauris. It has a highly touted restaurant, and I suspect they get along with writing your order on a pad with a pencil, but the restaurant was closed for vacation when we were there. In any case, I leave you with an image of the Luberon distilled to a window all aglow in the November drizzle.

There. You can't be any bluer than that, can you? Not unless you eat al La Mado that is.

Today, we vowed not to get in the Citroen, no matter how tempted we might be to take off and go somewhere else. We've vowed to spend the whole day around Lourmarin. After all, Friday is market day, and the squares are filled to overflowing with everything from fish to hats. There are tempting forest mushrooms, tablecloths, tubs of olives, spices. Folks behind glass cases full of moldy cheeses thrust big, sturdy knives at everyone who passes, tipped with some little morsel of cheese or slice of saucisson.

We had gobs of foodie fun. We bought a pigeonneau, a young pigeon or what we in the US call a squab in order to convince ourselves of the gourmet goodness of it. The butcher asked me if I wanted to clean it or let him do it, and I pointed to him, politely of course. Squab in Italy or France is generally sold defeathered but with internal organs intact. He cleaned the thing impeccably while keeping the edible bits like the liver beautifully intact. I've never done it that precisely. It was a joy to watch. Not that it would make a good television show or anything, but foodie fun is oddly technical sometimes.

As we were buying the rest of our dinner, including mushrooms called something like "Mouton feet", we noticed packs of wild tourists had begun flooding the market. The big, hulking tourist buses had hit town, probably tripling its population. We hurried home to get our stuff put away because we wanted to go to Cafe Gaby for lunch and had visions of being aced out by a clot of folks in shorts headed by someone continually stabbing a colorful umbrella lewdly toward the clear blue sky.

But alas, it was not to be. We snagged a table easily and locals quickly filled the joint. Some of them started moving tables around and we found ourselves at one end of a sort of horseshoe arrangement. Sitting beside us was an older woman who was wheezing so badly we didn't know if she'd make it through the meal. She ordered the duck leg and some boiled vegetables. They didn't bring her bread, which I think was part of a cat-and-mouse strategy. Eventually she asked for some. As soon as the waiter set it down and turned away, she filled her purse with it.

By now the other end of the horseshoe was in a convivial mood. Sturdy men got ready for the aioli--a big platter of boiled vegetables, fish and snails with a pot of garlic sauce--by stuffing napkins down the necks of their shirts and smoothing them gracefully over broad chests. Wine flowed. The conviviality increased to the point that the laughter was not only loud but it ended with snorts. Lots of snorts. If there was any question whether we were in the real Provence, it went out the window with the downing of the first pichet de vin rouge. Fun.

Martha ordered the aioli you see in the picture. It's a boiled garden, complete with pesky snails, plus some fish. The one potato is kinda small, so they included another the size of a soccer ball. I had the Andouillette with frites instead because I knew I could dip my frites in the aioli and still eat some of the vegetables.

I gotta tell you, we were so stuffed that after my afternoon nap Martha made me take a two hour walk. It didn't work. I'm still stuffed and the squab awaits, clean as a whistle. Oh, the meal plus a little wine and coffee set us back €28. I'd go again. And again.

P.S. If you plaster your green beens with enough aioli they will stick to your vertically deployed napkin when you happen to miss your mouth. I know this by observation. One kind gent had two of them displayed thusly. Way cool.

Today, the Provence villages of Roussillon and Lacoste were our targets. For the first time this week we heard plenty of English.

We stopped to see the 1st century Pont Julien Roman bridge near Roussillon, then went to the village itself.

Roussillon is touted as one of the most beautiful villages in Provence. It's hard to decide, trust me. What's unique about Roussillon is that it sits on what used to be a virtual gold mine of ochre. (Ochre ranges in color from yellow to violet red and is the result of some complicated processes that went on with ocean sand 110 million years or so ago. It's prized by users of natural colors, from house painters to artists and pot throwers.)

In any case, you can go down some stairs like you see in the picture and visit these abandoned open-air mines. The colors are quite impressive. The short loop takes a half hour.

We did it after lunch, which is probably a mistake. You'll want some strong light overhead to get the real effict of the colors; we had some deep shade in November. It was still impressive.

You'll find lots of ceramics in town, and we couldn't resist buying some plates which used a 17th century technique to make each plate show a unique swirl of color.

Then we headed over to Lacoste. Above Lacoste sits the 18th century chateau of the notorious Donatien Alphonse Francois Comte de Sade, otherwise known as the Marquis de Sade. There's an interesting bronze of him as you can see in the picture.

The walk to the castle, besides being steep, is quite interesting as well. The older parts of the village are particularly well preserved and evocative. English is spoken everywhere, because the Savannah College of Art and Design holds classes there.

The Chateau is owned today by Pierre Cardin, who has renovated parts of it and turned it and the quarry out back into performance space. He sponsors the Festival de Lacoste held in July and August.

Tonight, when the clouds rolled in, the old ruins of the Chateau looked somewhat sinister.

But the weather held as we headed up the hill to Bonnieux to buy some pate and a few chicken legs for dinner in the apartment tonight. When we got home to Lourmarin, we had a a pastis outside at Cafe Gaby, favored by Peter Mayle I'm told. There were just enough people out to make a nice evening; the French passing by our table as they went inside each greeted us formally, "Madame et Monsieur, buon jour!"

That was nice. November, lightly touristed, is perfect.

Today we loaded up the telephoto and took off for the Camargue. The Camargue is (French) cowboy country. There are the usual cowboy things, like cows, horses, and big steaks on restaurant menus--and there are the less manly things, like the pink flamingos begging for attention there on the right.

We stopped first at the old sheep barn that serves as the Musée Camarguais at Mas du Pont de Rousty. It was fun, but mostly in French. There was an interesting photo exhibition with pictures from 1910 that showed the good old days of the Camargue. It was a decent enough introduction to the culture of the place.

Then we headed to the town of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. What a hoot. I can't think of another town I've ever visited that was made up almost entirely of restaurants. You can eat, stroll the beach promenade, eat some more, go up on the terrace of the church, and, well, eat again if you wish because you've done it all.

The upside of all this restaurant competition is that prices are pretty darn moderate for the type of food that's being served. Huge stands sold food to take away, which would be a good money-saving tip if you're heading over to see the birds at the Parc Ornithologique de Pont de Grau, where they have a picnic table or two near the entrance or you can sit on a bench along the well-marked trails and watch flamingos mating while downing your sandwich.

We, however, headed off to the recommended Hostellerie du Pont de Gau, which happens to sit right outside the entrance to the bird park. I gotta warn you, opening a menu there can be hazardous to your health; because the first pages are devoted to over-the-top menus. €50 for lunch was a bit much. But page through, and the prices moderate a bit--to about twice what they're charging in Saintes-Maries.

So, rather than start our restaurant search all over again, we went ahead and ordered a single dish for each of us. I ordered the Petite Bouillabaisse. Nothing particularly petite about it. I got a big bowl with six or seven fish fillets plus some mussels and prawns, a plate with rounds of toast and aioli and grated cheese, and a big bowl of broth. As you ate you buttered up the toasts with aioli and let them sink into the broth a bit.When the broth in your bowl got low, some young woman in charge of these things came over and asked you if you wanted more ladeled over the whole deal, to which I said "oui" because I didn't know what else to say, my French being sub-par and all. It actually seemed worth the price (in France), which was €27.50. Martha had a huge grilled Loup de Mer fillet sitting on a bed of creamed leeks and it was perfectly cooked, fresh and mighty tasty, too. So, despite the cost, we were happy. Maybe it was the wine, but more likely it was the old "you get what you pay for" thing.

After lunch we walked the trails of the bird park through some scenic wetlands. Flamingos were everywhere, especially near the entrance. They protest a lot. Many people don't know that, but the screeching was mighty obnoxious. Maybe they do it for the tourists.

It took us about two hours to walk all the trails because there wasn't a way to make a neat loop out of the whole deal. Besides the birds we saw the typical horses and a bit later, as we drove home, the bulls of the Camargue. It was a fine, shirtsleeve afternoon for November. The horses were itching to take tourists on rides through the wild country of the Camargue, but there were few takers. If you want to see the Camargue at its finest, go in the off season.

Find out more about The Camargue. And click the pictures to see them bigger. They like that.