A better view of Apt

Apt has been our town for running errands, so this morning we decided to actually walk around the historic area in the midst of getting less exciting but important things accomplished. We found the car park this time (down by the river, with signs to mind your car if it starts raining a lot!) and Mom waited again at La Poste to change money while Dad and I walked around the main square waiting for her.

After meeting up, we walked along quieter pedestrian only streets to the Cathedrale Ste-Anne. You can see Ste Anne’s reliquaries (brought back from the Orient in the 3rd century after being found in 776 by Charlemagne) if you ask, but we decided not to bother anyone, as the church was empty except for us. I found the crypt to be of more interest, built beneath the front altar area of the church in two layers, the lower one pre-Roman, the upper dating from around the 13th century. The entrance was hidden during the wars, and so everything remains intact.

In the crypt

We wandered through portals left behind from the old city walls, but what really caught my eye was a little store selling the crystallized fruit that the city is famous for. The shopkeeper was very nice, and told us that there are two very old shops somewhere down by the river that make two kinds of crystallized fruit; one, the kind we were buying, was for eating just as it was, the other was made for bakers to put in pastries and breads. We bought selection of fruit, and found that the little mandarin orange was our favorite. Eaten peel and all, the insides we like pure liquid orange mixed with honey—or something like that. I really have never had anything quite like it before. The others were also good, the pear we liked especially as well.

Mmm... mandarin orange

In the afternoon, we drove just a little ways out of town to the tip of a loop we’d walked to the bories marked with a pink star on our map. From there, we walked on along the ridge, finding a group of secluded houses, with one built right into a borie ruins! Not sure how that worked on the inside, but it looked like a neat house.

Olives are getting big and almost ripe!

House with borie ruins

Looking back where we had walked