After two months of promising Alba a trip to the beach, but at the same time strategically manoeuvring her away from the beach toy aisle at our local(ish) Monoprix, we finally made it to the seaside.
As the Luberon weather plays daily tricks on us, with beautifully blue skies but a Mistral gale that can make it hard to open the front door, the forecast finally looked beach appropriate so off we went. Of course we left 1.5 hours later than planned, and decided to take the “scenic route”, so arrived a lot later than planned and bagged what I suspect was the last parking space in town.
Cue the most number of tourists we’ve seen in Provence so far (including Easter weekend in Gordes, and that’s saying something). The port is, granted, beautiful but its hard to appreciate the Portofino-twinned town through the hordes of hungry visitors jostling for a lunch table with a view.
If you happen to find yourself there – don’t try competing with them, instead explore a few roads in. Sacrifice the harbour view for a meal that doesn’t cost the earth and feels as “local” as you can get. We’d given up and opted for a baguette on the beach before we had a chance to look around properly (limited lunchtime flexibility for us these days).
For buggy-free souls – Le Patio looked lovely (can’t vouch for the food but beautiful tables pour deux and up a few steps to keep the monster trucks out). Also not in the tourist hot spot.
I read a review of Le Chaudron and thought it looked perfect, but then forgot about it by the time we got there. Next time..
And BADA, right overlooking the beach had a nice, well, beachy vibe with palms and wicker light shades (easily pleased..) – might be worth trying if you’ve a few bob to spare (it failed our usual rosé price test – cheapest local Cassis bottle was EUR 40). 
We did treat ourselves to a double espresso (mine with a little milk on the side, much to the visible disgust of the waiter who replied to my order in perfect French, with “ziss is a cafe créme, so you want a cafe créme?”) at L’Epicerie – lovely casual cafe with delish looking food (we do a lot of looking at food we’re not able to eat) on a surprisingly tranquil square. One upside of touristy towns is the joy of finding a quiet picturesque corner of it to yourselves. Definitely recommended.
Plage de la Grande Mer – fairly average, again too many people, but the sea is gorgeous and inviting, if freezing in April. And we remembered what a pain beaches are with small humans that need to nap and shouldn’t really eat all the sand. Next time we’ll need to explore some less obvious beaches. Apparently this was a reccy visit, so it’s apparently to be refined and re-done. 
Wine – strangely it’s hard to find south of Aix wine (roughly speaking, the Côte de Provence stuff – but there the appellation classifications are a little mind boggling) around us here in the Luberon, and we tend to buy direct from vineyard caves, so we wanted to stock up on some Cassis bottles for the rosé tasting session we’ve been planning for two months (but then drink all the samples before we’ve had a chance to organise ourselves). 
The cheapest Cassis rosé in the seemingly high-end wine shops in town was EUR16 – trés cher! Hoping that direct from cave prices might be a bit more appetising we tried Domaine du Paternel, but as we often find, their prices were more expensive. It was still worthwhile to tick one off the list, and get a bit closer to the vines that are certainly months ahead of our local vineyards in terms of green shoots (we’re yet to work out what this all means). Ally sensibly suggests we do these vineyard cave discussions in English so we can actually understand what they’re saying, but my “parlez-vous anglais” shame means we struggle on and nod when we haven’t a clue what information is being imparted.
Delicious nonetheless. And we discovered that the Sanary sur Mer Rosé festival is on over Eadie’s first birthday weekend – Happy Birthday Eadie!
By way of Provence 