Despite the abundance of movie stars and rock stars owning homes in Provence, none of them hung out at Café Le Verdun; I didn’t meet any while I lived in Aix-en-Provence. But I did have one Sisyphean road trip with my sister Cathy to see the castle and vineyard owned by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. I saw on the news that they bought Château de Miraval, which was about seventy kilometres from Aix, outside of the small village of Correns. I didn’t expect to see Brad mowing the lawn, but I thought my sister would like the drive and looking at the huge estate. It would also be cool for me to see the 35-room château where Pink Floyd recorded The Wall. After ninety minutes driving winding country roads from Aix, we idled the car beside the ditch that Google Maps indicated was Château de Miraval. All we could see were modest country homes, dirt roads and scraggly bushes. I don’t know where the château was hiding, but no amount of driving up and down every country road surrounding Correns yielded a clue. I felt that I was looking for the good wizards’ clubhouse in The Order of the Phoenix…all I needed was the right spell, and two adjacent fields would start to grind away from each other, revealing the secret vineyard and castle hidden from the Muggles.
Having failed in our quest, we headed home. I guess there is another way to look at our failure: my sister and I, who live at opposite ends of Canada, had a lovely drive on a sunny day along country roads in the south of France, and once back in Aix, shared some excellent rosé on our terrasse while Carol made one of my favourite meals, suprême de volaille rôti en persillade et poivronade, a crispy chicken breast on a colourful bed of peppers and tomatoes. And that made it a pretty good day.
– Billy
crowsenprovence 