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Our plan for the evening is to drive to Le Castelas (we've called to make
sure they're open for dinner tonite!), leave the car there and hike to
the crest of the Luberon before dinner at 8. As we drive east, we turn
onto the D232 and find one borie (round stone hut of indeterminate age
- some say medieval, some say 17th century...) after another. We pull
off the road and walk into one of these interesting structures. You can
pay to go into a reconstructed Borie Village near the town of Gordes,
but we had much more fun discovering them ourselves as we drove around
the Luberon. This unexpected stop, plus another for our friend the shepherd
and his sheep as we approached Sivergue, caused us to get to Le Castellas
too late to hike to the crest - so we went as far as we could, then returned
to the farm.
Ingrid and Gianni invited us and the other guests to enjoy a pitcher of
sangria on the rustic stone terrace overlooking the valley. We watched
the antics of a black goat up on the roof, and chatted in a combination
of French, English, and even German (well, not us!) as dusk fell, and
then entered the ancient vaulted stone room and sat at a long wooden table
together. We, Bob and Sue Winn of Provence Byways, and a German couple
were at one end, and the other end of the table was full of French tourists,
who joked that we were the foreign end of the table. Dinner was delicious,
and fresh from the farm - lamb again, as a 6 week old pet lamb gambolled
around the dining room floor - we tried not to feel guilty. Gianni, from
Sardinia, told us that the thin, flat bread was a recipe from the high
plateau of his country. The cheese course was a wooden platter of many
types of goat cheese, arranged by age, and a pot of farm-fresh honey.
I'd never had that combination before, and loved the taste of the opaque
honey on the aged cheese. Dessert was a surprise - brownies!
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