12 February 2024 – The winding road to Grasse

Miles driven today = 63

Total Miles to date = 1,039

I’m not sure how pleased I would be if the local church bells started ringing the hour at 6am every morning.  I’d certainly be very grumpy indeed if another lot went off straight away afterwards but that is exactly what happened this morning.  Thankfully we were only stopping in Le Val for the one night.

Today’s route has been one of those that I absolutely love driving but which Lisa detests sitting in the passenger seat, with seemingly never ending S bends and tight hairpins.  We worked our way east along the D562, through the gorgeous little towns of Carces and Lorgues and the rather more heavily populated Draguignan, as seen here through the trees.  

Lisa usually tucks into her breakfast while we are on the move but with the van swinging about so much there was no chance of her doing that.  So we pulled in to give her a chance to eat, or so that she had “something to puke up” as she so delightfully put it.  Suffice to say the road became even more wiggly for a while and the cruise control button remained thoroughly redundant.

My Ad-Blu low level warning light flashed on shortly before we parked up last night so we made a stop at Callian to replenish both that and the diesel tank.  We also dived into the nearby Lidl so we are now good for pretty much everything we might need for our first few days in Italy.

Our stopover tonight is in Grasse at Camping La Paoute, which is next door to an equestrian centre and hidden away behind an Auchan supermarket.  The reception was closed when we got here so we had a spot of lunch and were just finished with that when Monsieur tapped on the door and asked if we would like to check in early.  It’s one of ACSI’s new top bracket €27 a night (including hook up) sites and in all honesty the facilities are rather tired to warrant that sort of money.  But with so few alternative options open at this time of year around here I guess it’s very much a case of supply and demand.  At least we have quite a nice view from our door.

Grasse is famous for being the perfume capital of France and the town is full of perfumeries both large and small.  There is an International Perfume Museum here but it would take 40 minutes and 2 bus rides each way to get there, so as an alternative we took a short stroll up the road to the Galimard perfumery as we noted when we drove past that they do free tours for visitors.

Our enthusiastic guide had excellent English.  She explained how the different scents were traditionally extracted using copper stills.

For more delicate fragrances, petals of flowers like rose and Jasmine were placed in cases like these where the scent infused into the wax on which the petals were laid.  Apparently it takes 800kg of jasmine petals to create 1 litre of essence.  We have a jasmine bush in our garden.  I'm struggling to comprehend what nearly a tonne of petals looks like!

Then we got a bit of a history lesson.  Grasse was previously famous for its manufacture of leather gloves but these tended to get a bit smelly so somebody had the great idea of scenting them and so in the 17th Century Grasse’s perfume industry was born.  Galimard have themselves been around since 1742.

We were shown the laboratory where all the magic of creating the various perfumes happens and also this “organ” where one off bespoke scents can be created for the more discerning clientele.

Then of course at the end of the tour we were given the full sales patter in the shop.  We were each liberally sprayed with three different fragrances and asked to identify which we thought were classified as “fruity”, “spicy” and “floral”.  Lisa wasn’t particularly keen on any of them but she is a bit of a sucker for Jo Malone’s citrus varieties and we eventually found one which she really liked and at less than half the price Jo Malone would charge for the equivalent sized bottle, so I treated her.  I’ll get my reward in heaven no doubt.  The van is certainly very fragrant this evening.

13 February 2024 - Bonjourno Italia