Today we headed to the town of Roussillon which is one of the towns that every guide book and brochure says is a must see, they were right. It's a hill top village that's red. All the houses are coloured by the ochre on which the village sits on top of. It is only small but full of winding alleys and sunny corners, with old buildings in every shade of warm red possible. After exploring the village and wandering the town's market (yes I have planned village visits on market days) we followed the crowd to the ochre walk. Next to the village you can walk through the ochre cliffs which is amazing. The ochres are red, orange, white, yellow and are extracted for their natural pigment to make paint.
The first thing Callum did when we were surrounded by cliffs of it and standing in it was bend down and dig. You can imagine the colour he came out at the end of this walk. The cliffs were spectacular, eroded by wind and rain so that the shapes and spectrum of colour was beautiful. The walk was short but took you to a couple of different cliffs through a forest. I was amazed when I saw a lady in front if me in beautiful white shoes walking along. A very bad day to choose white. She seemed to be walking to try and not create dust (impossible) so her shoes don't get dirty. Very amusing.
The state of the kids when we emerged from the dust was priceless and being a natural colour pigment was not the easiest stuff to remove from them or their clothes later. I think they both may have slightly orange hands and feet for a couple of days. A lot of fun was had by all. Tomorrow Neil will be ticking another ride from his wish list, Mont Ventoux, and this is one of his top climbs. His support crew will drop him off somewhere around the base and we will meet him at the top as it is another iconic hill top finish of the Tour.
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