Breakfast à la française: bread, butter, jam/marmalade. Alternatively, corn flakes or super sweet musli. The sweetness got cloying after a day or two and I really did not enjoy it. I do not understand how French people can live on this kind of diet.

On the other hand, dinners at the gîte were varied and ranged from decent to really good, and the staff were fully familiar with vegetarian diets, which was a relief.

I still remember our experience at the little restaurant in Luchon in the Pyrenees, about 2004 or so, where Eric and I were served a “vegetarian” dinner consisting of three side orders (rice, French fries and boiled potatoes) and some mixture containing little pink specks that smelled distinctly of meat. When we asked the staff about those specks, our concerns were dismissed – those were just “tout petits morceaux de porc”, nothing at all to worry about.

The packed picnic lunches consisted of bread, cheese, a salad, a fruit and a chocolate bar. All salads were drenched in a mustard vinaigrette, and after a few days we were pretty tired of it. I asked the staff to please skip the mustard for the remaining lunches. He looked most puzzled.

We stayed in gîtes for the first few nights, and then in a Mongolian yurt that was embedded a bit incongruously in the French landscape. Interesting, spacious and convenient compared to a room in the gîte, but somewhat less convenient in that the shower was located outside at some distance, and the toilet was an outhouse.

Outhouses are a common thing in Sweden but apparently not in France – the one outside the yurt had a printed page with explanations and instructions on the door.

A totally unexpected benefit of late-night outhouse trips was that I was reminded to go out and see the starry sky. Summer skies in Stockholm are bright to begin with, and light pollution doesn’t help. Villeplane is further south and there are no cities nearby, so the sky was darker than anything I had seen for years. So full of stars! Even the Milky Way was easy to see.

For the first time in my life I also saw fireflies. Those don’t live in Sweden. I had expected them to shine with a constant light, but to my surprise these flashed on and off.

The highlight of today’s hike was our lunch break at a shallow stream. The water wasn’t cold at all so the kids spent a long time climbing and splashing around. Eric and I contented ourselves with cooling our feet.

Today was the first day of a two-day trek from Villeplane to Sauze (and back tomorrow).

The start of today’s walk followed the same trail as yesterday’s, but after about 2 km the paths diverged. The whole hike today was only about 10 km but there was an amazing amount of variety packed into those kilometers.

North-facing slopes were almost like Swedish forests and meadows, with familiar flora everywhere: familiar grasses, pines, daisies, wild strawberries. But then suddenly there’s a clump of orchids, or a martagon lily growing next to the path, and it was very clear that we were not in Sweden after all.

The mountains themselves were made of unfamiliar materials. Rocky outcrops are black shale instead of granite.

South-facing slopes were like picture-book scenes of Provencal nature: sun-baked rocks with tufty carpets of low flowers in all sorts of colours. From afar some of it resembled familiar vistas from our walks in Great Britain (Scotland and Cornwall) but what looked like gorse turned out to be Spanish broom, and instead of heather there was lavender and thyme.

The warmer, south-facing areas had a lot of small lizards, but they were so quick to hide that often the only sign we saw was brief movement and maybe a rustling of fallen leaves. In the forests we often heard cuckoos calling.

Everywhere was full of butterflies, grasshoppers and crickets. And ticks. So many ticks! The rest of the family got one or two each during the whole week. I got so many I lost count – I felt like I was constantly picking them off myself, despite wearing a long sleeve top and long trousers most of the time.