Teenager En Provence by Annie Le Voguer.
Category: Family Travel book
Paperback: 204 pages
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1906210128
ISBN-13: 978-1906210120

"The journey through France was more sickening than usual. The boot of the car was laden with as much as Mum could cram in. There were even more bags under our legs and between the seats. Not even the comfort of a return date. This was a one way ticket.

To pass the time, the uncool and I would see how many types of foreign car we could spot. This become very boring before we’d even got as far as Rennes, less than an hour from the ferry. I couldn’t read or write as a wave of car sickness would crash over me. And of course, eventually before the day ended, he would have wound me up and we would argue.

By the time we arrived at our bergerie (aka the shed) I was almost relieved to see it. We stopped overnight to drop off a few things in readiness to start renovation (buckets of white paint, cleaning fluid, brushes etc) and to pick up the uncool’s motorbike, a Yamaha 250cc, on which he was to ride to and from his college.

The mountain roads from Bargemon would round and round to Grasse then round and down to the coast, straightening out as we were on the home run. Some of these roads looked as if they had been chiselled out of the mountainside. Sheer rock overhung dangerously low over the road, to our right side a precipitous fall of several hundred feet into the sea of pine and cypress trees.

Potholes also lurked in the tarmac that was probably laid when the Romans were still in the vicinity, maybe they were the result of explosions during the Second World War even, when the area was a haven for the Resistance.

It was on one of those windy bends that the uncool disappeared from behind us."