The Image Goddess
La Belle France
The photographs in the first five categories below
were taken on a journey through southwest France (August to September 1999) which began
and ended in Toulouse and took the Goddess and her favorite minion to Gascony, the
Basque Country, the Pyrénées, the Atlantic coast, and briefly down to Spain
for tapas one evening; then north to Bordeaux and to Cahors (a wonderful city on the
Lot River) from where we explored the excellent vineyards of that region as well as the
nearby Dordogne Valley, with its abundance of ruined châteaux and its impressive
Cro Magnon cave paintings.
The sixth category contains a few snapshots from our 1998 trip through the other half
of southern France, from Montpellier east through Provence to the French Riviera (and
beyond, eventually to Italy's Ligurian Coast, to Vienna, and to Prague). Included are some
photos of Paris (where we arrived before taking the TGV to the south), of which the Goddess
has taken embarrassingly few. She hopes one day to remedy this deficit.
There is simply not room to extoll all the virtues and attributes of the French
landscape, especially since the Goddess prefers to communicate with pictures. Voilà.
All images copyright Cynthia Mitchel 2000
