As I drove westwards along the A8, the purple hills of the Massif des Maures were rising towards a clear bluebell sky. Cradled within the Var between Frejus and Hyeres lies a bewitching hinterland, a low mountain range known in Provencal as Lei Mauro: the Sombre Ones.
My husband is French and, before we bought our olive farm, we spent our early courting days in Paris. So I got to know well the intricacies of the city.
Provence has become a moveable feast. To the south is the glittering Mediterranean; to the north are the Alps, while to the west and east the margins are fuzzy and seem to expand further with each passing year.
Property in Provence can cost a fortune if you don't know where to look and a glass of champagne sipped on the pristine whitewashed terrace of one of the seafront hotels in Cannes can set you back the price of a meal in any other establishment.
To say I love the Christmas season at our home in the South of France is an understatement. I get such a kick out of preparing the house for the arrival of family; seeing our scruffy old villa bursting at the seams with loved ones.
Christmas in the Caribbean, after a tiring flight, may sweep you out of the cold but it's not a real Christmas, is it?
The French take their festive platters seriously and spend lavishly on them. Christmas Eve, rather than Christmas Day, is when they tuck into the big family meal known as Le Gros Souper or Le Reveillon. Traditionally, it was served after the return from midnight Mass.
I always have a notebook - I have kept diaries since I was eight years old. My preferred choice is a Moleskine because they have a pocket at the back where I can keep airline tickets and my passport.
Olives changed the direction of my life. My husband Michel and I found a ruined farm with an olive grove near Cannes. I became fascinated by olives and found myself travelling around the Mediterranean for 17 months, researching two books on the subject.
I am a passionate swimmer and scuba-diver.
Pinhao, spectacularly haltered by terraced vineyards, produces most of the world's finest ports.
Salamanca is known as La Ciudad Dorada, the Golden City, because it is built from Villamayor sandstone and when the sun reflects on it the city has a warm amber tint. The university, founded in 1218, is the fifth-oldest in Europe and one of the most renowned, judged on a par with Oxford.
Chicago's history is a classic American tale of reinvention, while its present is buzzy, chic and architecturally stunning.
It was Captain Cook who christened the Whitsunday Islands while sailing past them in 1770 on what he mistakenly believed was Whitsunday. His calendar was askew, but the name stuck.
The Whitsundays are a sailor's paradise and because they sit at the southern limit of one of the seven natural wonders of the world, the Great Barrier Reef, they are also a diver's dream.
For many of us, lavender's deep colour and its unforgettable fragrance encapsulate the heady joys of Provence.
There are several ways to 'do' the Lavender Route. You can hook up with a tour, travelling from the old Roman city of Orange or Montelimar and wind up six or seven days later in Grasse, the renowned perfume capital of the world.
I loved Forcalquier, with its narrow medieval streets. Its elegant 12th Century cathedral boasts a carillon that chimes every Sunday morning. I also found a junk shop from which I could have furnished our entire farm.
There are more than 800 different types of olive tree and each region has its own varieties, creating unique flavours.
While the olive is high in fat, it's monounsaturated fat, which, in a balanced diet, can help control heart disease by lowering cholesterol levels.
All olives ripen green, then change to rose, shades of purple, and black. According to region, this process takes about four months and, once the fruits are ripe, they can be picked at any stage.
The olive's properties are not altered, but the flavour of oil pressed from green olives is different from black - green oil tends to be peppery and black has a more mushroomy taste.
Jerusalem is not the oldest city in the Western world, but its long and confused past takes us back to pre-Old Testament times.
The Garden of Gethsemane is halfway up the Mount of Olives, where Christ grappled with his courage during those last dark hours of life. Today it is a Franciscan monastery.
Gethsemane - the word is Hebrew for olive press - is just across the valley from Kidron, which in turn is a stone's throw from the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock.
Jerusalem sits on a hill surrounded by valleys. It is a dry, craggy region but ideal for olive trees, which require minimal irrigation.
Originally developed in Germany in the 18th Century, ice wine is made from grapes that have been left on the vines until deep winter when the fruits, frozen by ice, contain more concentrated sugar. Only then are they are harvested, sometimes at night.
Toronto is not a paler version of New York as I might have supposed. It possesses a style of its own: genteel, sometimes hippylike, rustic, peace-loving, pioneering, generous.
In Britain, we have a vague idea that being by the sea does you good, clears your lungs and regenerates your system.
I have discovered a gem, a tiny, relatively unknown Greek island. Kastellorizo lies in the Aegean Sea a mile off the Turkish Turquoise Coast, the most easterly of the Dodecanese islands.
Provence, just one relatively small part of France, is almost twice the size of Wales, with double the population. It's a region of the south that stretches from the borders of Monaco and Italy in the east to Hyeres in the west, the Alps in the north to the sparkling Mediterranean in the south.
Queen Victoria loved the French Riviera. She visited on nine occasions and did a great deal to give this area its chic international reputation.
By the beginning of the 20th Century, Cannes and the coastal strip that winds its rocky way to Monaco was the winter resort for the rich, the Royals and a few well-heeled writers and artists, such as the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir.
During the Second World War, the Cote d'Azur as a holiday destination closed down, but once the Allies had liberated the coast in 1944, the Riviera's infrastructure grew rapidly.
Once you pass by the high crests of the snow-capped Pyrenees and move to the wild shores of the very lowest tip of southwest France bordering Spain, you are in Basque country.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Biarritz was a community of whalers. During the Middle Ages, it had grown from a small fishing village into a profitable whaling industry. Whale oil was liquid gold to these sea-faring folk.
Biarritz is world-famous for its surfing. The waves roll high and wild and surfers cross the planet to pit their skills against the swells and curls of these waters.
From September 1914 to August 1918, four major battles were fought along the banks of the River Somme in the region of Picardy, France. These included the 1916 Battle of the Somme, intended to drive the Germans out of France.
Warsaw's historic heart was deliberately almost entirely destroyed towards the end of the Second World War by the German occupying troops. After the war, it was painstakingly rebuilt and that reconstruction is perceived as expressing the nation's determination to survive, to conserve its history and its culture.