Maggie's Farm

I didn't mention that our hiking trip in Provence was mainly in Le Luberon National Park. Lots of villages in the area. Best times to go are May or October - no heat, few tourists, and off-season prices. Plenty of gnarly mountains which can be considered foothiils of the Alps to the east.

Mrs. BD's favorite village was Lourmarin. It's surrounded by villas and farms. Expensive to buy there. I doubt Lourmarin is crowded in peak season because there are few places to stay unless you rent a villa.

My topic for this post is routine shopping in a village. In Lourmarin, market day is Friday. All of the producers and farmers and clothing-sellers assemble in a different village each day. No supermarkets anywhere near. Clothing, fish, meat - everything. The marketplace is filled with people and dogs, and by 4 pm it's disassembled from the village square and moved on.

For starters, the only daily food store in Lourmarin is the place below. True, they do make a lot of those great 4" deep kiches each morning but they are sold by 9 am. I think people drive once in a while to regular supermarkets in the suburbs of Aix or Avignon for supplies in the way we drive to Costco.

Some of my Friday marketplace pics are below the fold - 

Plenty of pics etc. of the Friday market below the fold - 

Fishing is work. Halibut is a delicious fish, one of my favorites along with Grouper and a few others.

You can do it on a fancy French ship, Le Commandant Ponant (which the two chuckleheads give you a tour of, below), or on a more spartan Russian ice-breaker (second video, with much more Arctic scenery).

Lots of Cod too

Amateurs, but not complete beginners

Europe counted on Australian grain through the 1800s to early 1900s, and later. The great square-rigged ships continued the grain trade through the 1940s.

Their route took advantage of the westerly winds to circle the globe in the Roaring Forties around the Cape of Good Hope, to Australia, then east around Cape Horn. 11 months or so.

Living with dangerous people in cages

Pink Floyd was a heck of a successful rock group. A founder, Syd Barrett, became schizophrenic but seems to have remained a shadow member of the group. Sound and fury signifying nothing? You be the judge. 

What are your criteria to label a person a "solid citizen"?

That topic came up over beers with friends a few nights ago. It was like a college bull session for adults. When I was younger I would have considered it to be an American bourgeois question, unworthy of consideration by sophisticated kids like we were. We were all young idiots and certain about everything as only youth can be.

Assuming that we all have plenty of flaws, what would it take for a person to achieve the label of Solid Citizen? And is it worth thinking about? 

Bernard Purdie and Friends.

Deep sea fishing on the North Atlantic. Remarkable.

It is more or less year-round. Good honest work.

On a nice boat