There are certain privileges that come with a fresh set of corn rows, and one of them, we decided, was an excuse for a spontaneous road trip. So on a morning that offered no particular reason to stay put, my husband and I pointed the car north toward the Plateau de Valensole — and went.

We’d been watching the lavender for weeks, the way you obsessively track a friend’s flight on a map. The plateau blooms in a narrow window, and every year we’d somehow missed it. Not this year. We arrived to find the fields in absolute peak — that electric, unrepeatable purple that photographs can approximate but never quite capture, stretching in ruler-straight rows toward a pale limestone horizon.

“We arrived to find the fields in absolute peak — that electric, unrepeatable purple that photographs can approximate but never quite capture.”

And then, because we are exactly who we are, I retrieved my wedding dress from the back seat. Bringing it along had been a last-minute impulse — a trash the dress shoot we’d never quite got round to organising. There is something genuinely freeing about running through lavender in wedding tulle with no photographer booked, no shot list, no plan. Just two people being silly in a field, the hem getting purple-stained, the whole dress smelling extraordinary for weeks afterwards.

The drive home was the kind that makes you forget you’re supposed to be going anywhere. We swung south past the great limestone flank of Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne’s obsession, watching its colour shift from chalk-white to a deep amber as the afternoon wore on. Then through the cool shadows of the Massif de la Sainte-Baume, a landscape so different — dark, wooded, almost medieval — that it felt like another country entirely. And finally, Cassis: the harbour glittering, a cold rosé justified.

Some days you plan. Some days you just go, and the day does the rest.

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