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Wednesday, October 11th, St-Tropez, France
48
hours later, we arrive in St-Tropez, France. It
was mostly a motor in light winds, but, to quote a dear
friend, Bruce Cunard, "An easy motor is a good passage."
We caught a bunch of fish, the girls self administered
two days of school, and much to our surprise, here we
are in France. Once we took off from Mallorca, we
started nailing down our destination a little more
precisely. The destination we originally had in
mind, the National Park at Ille du Port Cros, was pretty
remote and unlikely to have any internet access.
We still have to finalize our 2005 tax return, and we
needed to get online, so we started looking for an
alternative. An old friend from high school, John
Dodds, had vacationed recently in St-Tropez, which was
only 20 miles further, so I pulled out the cruising
guide and started reading about it. I was shocked
to read a name I recognized very well:
St-Tropez was “discovered” as a resort much later
than many of the other places along the coast. One
of the reasons it was not fashionable early on is
that the town faces into the
mistral
and so does not have the benign winter climate of
other resorts sheltered from this cold winter wind.
Guy de Maupassant visited St-Tropez in his yacht
Le
Bel-Ami at
the end of the 19th century and expounded
on its charms to his friends. No doubt Paul
Signac, the
post-Impressionist disciple of
Seurat, heard of it through the grapevine
and, when he visited here on his yacht in 1892, he
decided to stay. Over the years a celebrated group
of artists came to join him including Matisse,
Bonnard,
Marquet and
Dunoyer de
Segonzac. We
can thank M. Georges Grammont,
a wealthy manufacturer of cables, for getting
together a collection of the paintings of this
group, and numerous other paintings and sculpture,
which are housed in the deconsecrated chapel of
L’Annonciade at the
western end of the harbour.
It is one of the best collections of early 20th-century
French paintings around and not to be missed.
The Dunoyer clan are great friends of ours in Annapolis and
were some of the first guests we had on ZIA in
August 2005.
Francois is half French and half American and I was aware of
his family's noble heritage (the de Segonzac part of his
name) but had no idea he had a famous artist in the midst.
All signs seemed to point to St. Tropez. The
weather is mellow and the anchorage roomy so we are happy to
be at rest.
I posted a new picture page from
Barcelona and Mallorca, in addition to the
September photos that I posted a while ago but forgot to
mention. What else are you going to do for five hours
in the middle of the night on nightwatch?
Next entry
>>>>>>>
Many thanks to our friend Craig
Homenko for his assistance in setting up the website.
We also would like
to thank our buddy Scott Brunner who has been kind
enough to host the website on his server.
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