Departures set by when the lavender flowers, not by the school holidays.
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Lavender in Provence flowers roughly from 25 June to 20 July, then it is cut. That is why we run only three departures and none of them in August. Anyone selling you lavender fields in September is selling you stubble.
We stay in Cavaillon, a dull little town with one advantage: it sits in the middle of everything. Thirty kilometres to Avignon, twenty five to Gordes, an hour and a half to the Valensole plateau. That last number is why we leave for Valensole at half past four in the morning. It sounds brutal, but by six you are standing at the edge of a purple field with almost nobody around, and by nine, as the coaches from Nice roll in, you are having breakfast in the village. Our guide Zuzana knows two growers who let us onto their land, so nobody is trespassing.
The rest of the week is slower. Avignon with the Papal Palace and the bridge that goes nowhere. Gordes and the Sénanque abbey. The Verdon gorge, where you can swim in the turquoise water of Lac de Sainte Croix, so pack a swimsuit. The Saturday market in Apt is the biggest in the region, it runs from eight, and you will come home with olives, goat cheese and honey you will talk about for months. Only breakfast is included, and that is deliberate. In Provence it is worth eating where you feel like eating, not where the hotel has a contract. The group tops out at fourteen and we travel by minibus, which matters, because the roads into villages like Gordes are narrow and a full size coach simply cannot park there. The drive from Slovakia takes close to nineteen hours. It is the longest transfer in our catalogue and we will not pretend it is pleasant.
We leave Turzovka at 17:00 with pickups in Žilina and Trenčín. The route runs through Austria, northern Italy and along the French coast. It is about 1500 kilometres, you sleep on board and we stop every three hours. Coffee and water on the coach are on us.
The morning is the Roman aqueduct at Pont du Gard, standing without mortar for two thousand years. The afternoon is Avignon: the Papal Palace, the walls and the Saint Bénézet bridge. We check in at Cavaillon around six. Dinner is on your own and Zuzana will name three places under twenty euros.
Wake up at 4:15, departure at 4:30. We reach the plateau around six, as the sun comes up and the lavender smells strongest. Two hours for photographs, then breakfast in Valensole village. We drive back in the afternoon for a siesta and a free evening, with an optional aperitif in town.
Gordes is a village glued to a cliff and the best view is from the lay by just before the entrance. Below it sits Sénanque abbey with its lavender field, still farmed by the monks. In the afternoon we visit Roussillon and the ochre trail, which turns your shoes red. Leave the white trainers at home.
A full day in the Verdon gorge. We drive the Route des Crêtes with five stops above the drop, which in places is 700 metres deep. In the afternoon we stop at Lac de Sainte Croix, with time to swim and to rent a canoe for about 20 EUR an hour.
The Saturday market in Apt opens at eight and we give it two hours, so a shopping bag is worth bringing. At eleven we head home with a lunch stop near Turin. We are back in Turzovka around seven on Sunday morning.
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