Sault Lavender Festival

Sault Lavender Festival

If you saw a sign like this I'm sure you'd want to go wouldn't you? Well we did - to a lavender festival in the lovely town of Sault that is held once a year by the locals, as a way of celebrating harvesting the lavender crop. We got there early and is was a real privilege to be there.
We heard about 6 other people speaking English all day and it seemed almost everyone there was French. That's true for everywhere we've been in this area including Isle sur la Sorgue. I wonder if this is seasonal because a lot of French people take their annual holidays in August. Maybe at other times of the year there are more English speaking people - I don't know.
We estimate that there were 7- 8 thousand people there.

It was all quite casual with a parade interrupted frequently. The over riding feeling for me was how proud these people are of what they do and how much they enjoyed celebrating that.

                              People of all ages participated. Miss Lavender posed for us.

Look at the character in the photos of these older people that Bob captured.
The group on the left were happy to pose for us.

                                Horses and donkeys dressed for the occasion and even pranced.

There was a mobile lavender distillery.
The fete is held on a racecourse and fields of lavender are grown in the middle of the course and harvested on the day. You were allowed to pick from the plants before they were harvested. This satisfied my strong urge to pick it in the fields we'd been to where it's understandably forbidden.

A huge pile of lavender was left for people to gather. The size diminished during the day. This was nearly at the end.

Bands played and there was some wonderful traditional Provencal dancing.

There was a display of old tractors. I liked this one because the driver was talking on his I phone which was not so old!

We booked ahead and joined many others for a picnic type lunch on tables under the trees. It was a lovely communal feeling. The food was served on individual trays which you collected and then found a seat.

We sat next to a French family with young children. The grandmother spoke a little English. I showed the children some games on my I Pad that I have for our grandchildren. They loved them so that was a big hit. 

An elderly lady opposite just stared at me for about 2 minutes straight when she heard I was from Australia. It was very quaint. Don't know if she thought I'd start hopping like a kangaroo or what! She wasn't rude or unfriendly - just fascinated.

Nearly everyone left with bunches of lavender that they'd bought or gathered. There was a market with every lavender product conceivable being sold. We got some lavender too and that's Bob in blue carrying it in my handbag.
A great day.