Staycation. A morning of European fantasy.

With rising gas-prices, the neologism "staycation" has come into popular use.
Instead of the sacrosanct summer-road-trip, or the even more expensive plane-trip, many families are opting to stay at home during their time-off...(It's the economy, stupid)

Ahh, time-off...
If only we could be like the Germans and the French, with their legally-mandated month-or-more of paid vacation...Then we could just drive over the Alps for a several-week-stay in a villa overlooking the Mediterranean, no? Of course, the gas to get there would cost the equivalent of ELEVEN dollars a gallon; small detail...

Today, then--a morning of gas-free 'staycation,' as I went for a bike-ride that turned into 22 miles (and I didn't die!) along the Rillito trail here in Tucson...Who has a spare two-hours on a weekday morning for such self-propelled leisure? Ahh--that's where the beauty of being a teacher comes in...Less-than-ideal wages, perhaps, but summers off...(At least this summer, I don't have to take coursework...not always so fortunate...)

So--pedalling this morning in a sun-blasted landscape, along the dry riverbed, with the occasional mesquite-shaded stretch, some olive trees, occasional hardy wildflowers still in bloom, adobe and stone-buildings with tile-roofs visible here and there...

...it got me thinking about my first time in the south of France.
At the end of my year-living-in-Paris (NINE years ago already) I was invited to go visit some friends' relatives. Can't say no to that...Several hours on a train past Burgundy, past Lyon, and the wet north becomes a distant memory as you step out into the bright dryness of Provence, with its June chorus of cicadas, the air fragrant with herbs...The descriptions fall hopelessly into cliché, but the beauty is no less diminished by the fact that the region is so (over)visited and depicted by writers, painters, and wealthy northern-Europeans-who've-bought-and-restored-old-homes-there-and-then-have-written-ad-nauseum-about-it...

The next day, the couple with whom I was staying lent me a bike and suggested I go for a ride out of town. Miramas, just to the NW of Marseille, is rather ho-hum, but the surrounding rolling countryside, my real introduction to Provence, is a sunny balm that soothes the urban-senses...

...the fabled landscape of silvery-green olive-trees below centuries-old-hilltop-villages in the quiet of a summer's mid-day:

And, of course--the lavender, along with my first glimpse of the Mediterranean in the distance:

...then riding up the hill to the village of Miramas-le-vieux, founded about 1100 years ago:

I biked into the courtyard of this provençal-romanesque chapel, built in the XIth century:

The top of the hill even has a few meager ruins of a château--sacked in 1590 during the Wars of Religion...
Several of the village's streets are crosed by flying-buttress supports between the buildings of honey-colored stone:
...and the southern end of the village overlooks an inlet of the Mediterranean:
...then riding back to the modern town, this section of the newly-built high school caught my eye:
...thankfully, the educatocrats stuck with some of the region's Roman history for an interesting way to build a new school, instead of just throwing up a big blank boring box.

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Back to Tucson. No eleventh-century romanesque hilltop villages here...although just a few hours to the north are the thousand-year-old stone and adobe cliff-dwellings of the Anasazi...

Not quite as fabled as the hilltop villages of Provence, but the biking/jogging trails along the Rillito, with the Santa Catalinas to the near north, are a perfectly pleasant way to spend a summer staycation morning:So, back home now, and dinner's going--got the slow-cooker on, so when my wife gets off work, there'll be home-cooked food to greet her. Thankfully, her work schedule right now is part-time, so she won't 'resent' my having time-off while she's still working...