The D17 is the scenic route through the scrub pine forests along the southern 
base of Mont Sainte-Victoire. It’s also the only route, a narrow, sometimes single-lane-wide road with no center divide. Thankfully, at this time of year, there are few cars and, once off on the trails, fewer people.
The road heads east from Aix-en-Provence past the boules courts of the village of Le Tholonet, where the artist Paul Cezanne lunched with his friends more than a century ago. It then passes a sign for honey, a winery and one or two stone houses, winding in tight switchbacks up until the mountain looms directly overhead.
Our planned destination today, a sunny, mild celebration of spring, was lunch at Le Relais de Saint Ser followed by a hike to La Chapelle Saint-Ser, a slightly more than 2-mile roundtrip that ascends some 600 or 700 feet to the chapel on the mountain’s wall that’s been a sanctuary for more than 1,100 years.
Alas, Le Relais, with its beautiful terrace turned out to be in mid-renovation; we escaped after a standoff with a very large semi truck coming straight up a dirt road we were trying to go down. But the hike proved bracing even with peanuts and dried apricots for lunch. And it was a perfect distance for our aging knees.
This is wonderful hiking country in the cool days of 
spring. The visitors center Maison St. Victoire sells excellent maps for $7 that give routes, distances, difficulty and vertical ascent for a few dozen hikes on this imposing limestone mountain, painted time and time again by Cezanne. At the center, we counted 13 donkeys and a horse in its field and at least one rabbit in a hutch. It also offered a good place for a pit stop before and after the hike.
On our second stop there, we ran into our language school friends, Al and Yoly Wickerson, who are getting in shape for the next leg of what will likely end up as a 3,000-mile-bikeride around France and nearby countries. But this morning they had to deal with more than untoned muscles after three weeks of sightseeing in Italy. Not all that far out of Tholonet, they’d had a scary encounter with a sanglier, a wild boar. Luckily for them it was trapped on the other side of a fence, which it charged twice as they rode by, bouncing back.
Al and Yoly have their own blog, www.silverwheeltrek.blogspot.fr, filled with photography. So naturally I asked if they’d stopped to take a picture.
“We got out of there as fast as we could,” Yoly said. Can’t say I blame her.