Monday, November 9
Today we hit the road, first stop was the town of Castellane where there is a chapel “Notre-Dame du Roc” honouring the Virgin Mary, and is one of the oldest monuments in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department. The rock (184 m high) on which the chapel is built is a natural marvel, towering above the village with the statue of Mary overlooking the town of Castellane. The chapel was built on the remains of a Roman edifice. Some interesting info about the Notre-Dame du Roc can be found here.
The hike up to the cliff. You can see the steeple at the top of the rock.
View from the Notre-Dame du Roc down towards the town of Castellane.
We hiked up the rock to the chapel and spent some time inside it. After our walk down we found a boulangerie where we bought a baguette and some treats to complement the picnic lunch in the cooler in the car. We found a great little spot by the Verdon river to sit and have lunch.
After lunch we continued on the windy, switch-backy beside the cliff road to the Gorges du Verdon, also called the Grand Canyon du Verdon, it is a spectacular canyon (worth the drive) that forms a border between the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and the Var. Up to 700 m deep, the 21-km-long canyon varies in width between 6 and 100 m at the bottom and 200 to 1500 m at its rim. We stopped at a couple look outs and crossed a bridge connecting the sides of the gorge over the river. The bridge, Pont de l’Artuby, happens to be the highest in Europe.
The kids at the Gorges du Verdon and the Pont de l’Artuby behind them.
One of the stops along the drive of the Gorges du Verdon.
We parked the car and walked across it and used the opportunity as a physics lesson mainly for Shelby. We dropped pebbles down and timed how long it look to hit the ground. Then at home Justin and Shelby worked on the equation of how to figure out the height of the bridge with the info we had of the speed of the pebbles falling. They came pretty close, I think they had 200 metres and it was actually 182 metres. But then there was discussion about human error (or human mom error) as I was the one timing and going off of them saying go and stop and therefore my reaction time to hitting stop was probably the difference in the 18 metres. Regardless, it was a pretty cool experiment.
We carried on a bit more to some of the lookouts along the gorge. It was amazing as there were so few cars and people around it almost felt a bit eerie being so quiet. We read in the summer that it gets rather busy with tourists and camping in the area so we lucked out yet again by hitting it in the low season. I for one am super thankful, having more cars on the roads would have made for a more stressful drive on all the twists and turns.
