A Month in Provence Pt 2: Inundation

The phone rings and it is the gang. They cannot get home! All the roads are closed! Outside the rain, thunder and lightning continue. The roads surrounding the villa are rivers so it is too dangerous to walk outside. We don't know if we should laugh at our predicament or cry. We are stuck.

Finally, after a few hours, the water temporarily subsides a little and the Calvary arrives with candles, flashlights and rain gear. Unfortunately food is still not available, as the supermarkets are still flooded. However, our heros inform us that the Authentic Pizza Restaurant has agreed to serve a limited menu, despite the fact that their kitchen is still flooded. This is possible because their wood fired pizza oven is on a higher level and is working. So we troop down to the restaurant for our one meal of the day.

As we drive through the village, we realise that the power is on. We cannot understand why ours is still off. At the restaurant this mystery is solved. Apparently one must push a reset button after a power failure, to regain electricity. Our landlord forgot to inform us of this function so we probably spent an unecessary extra 6 or so hours in the dark.

After a wonderful hot meal and coffee, we head back home and phone our landlord to ask where the reset button is to be found and our power is restored. Fortunately, it is not the reset button for the clock. It will remain silent until the day before we leave the village.

Today we head out for a larger town of Bagnol about 25 kilometers away and find one supermarket on higher ground, that is not closed. We stock up like starving refugees.

When we get back to the villa our French neighbour across the street comes to inform us that a notice has been posted on the clock tower. We are not to use the tap water for drinking, cooking or to brush our teeth. The village water has been polluted by the flood, so each day the village will provide bagged distilled water to it's residents.

Fortunately we had not been drinking tap water and had not been able to cook. However, we had been brushing our teeth with the local stuff. For the next week and a half we pick up our bagged water at a local school grounds

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