Forty years ago

Today our itinerary took us from the medieval city of Aigues-Mortes, then around the Camargue region, the city of Arles and finally to beautiful Aix en Provence, before we arrived in the Luberon region where our friends Chantal and Jean-François Premat live. On the way there, we stopped in Salon de Provence, about one hour north of Marseilles, where I spent a significant amount of time performing my mandatory military service at a French air force base there (B.A. 701) which is also the French equivalent of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. It took me a lot of time to get there since I could absolutely not recognize the place as it had grown so much and changed so drastically since 1969 when I left it. We finally discovered its entrance unchanged and then a whiff of forty years old memories hit me. I was working there at a small squadron of Mystere IV jet, filling up jet-fuel and working as a mechanic, just bidding my time. Not a particular happy moment of my life, but not a terrible one either. I just had some regrets that I didn’t more visiting around that beautiful region instead of only going back to my Northern Alps every chance I got…