Eight nights, two beds, and what it takes to reserve a Candlemas week in inland Provence

Most of this you could arrange yourself, and the office would rather say so first: the houses take direct reservations, the roads are easy to drive, and nobody is queueing for anything in February. What is left when you reserve a Candlemas week in inland Provence is eight or nine telephone calls in the middle, made in working hours that are not yours.

• Whatever is agreed comes back to you in writing from the supplier, before any money moves.
• No card is asked for on this site and none is stored: the supplier takes payment on its own terms.
• A request sent through the form is answered in writing within one working day.

Most of it you could arrange yourself

The weeks in this catalog are sorted by one number: how much of each one you could have arranged without an office. This one sits at the second step of four. You could arrange most of it yourself, and we would rather write that down here than have you work it out in a car park afterwards. Both houses take direct reservations and answer their email inside two days. The markets are free, they fall on the mornings they have kept for decades, and nobody needs to introduce you to a market. The car is a form on a website.

What is left for us is duller than a page like this usually admits. In the first fortnight of February roughly half of what a village advertises is closed for its annual break, and almost none of that reaches the internet; the shutters carry the notice, and you read it standing in front of them. So we telephone. We find out which bakery in the valley opens on the Monday, which of the two kitchens is taking reservations that week, and whether the lane up to the second house is being resurfaced again. If that sounds like a job you would enjoy, take it, and keep the eight days for yourself.

Underfoot in the first week of February

The country is limestone and it is worked in terraces. North and east of Aix the ground climbs in dry walls built without mortar, planted with olives cut hard back in January and with vines that in February are black stumps in red earth. Villages sit on the ridges because the flat ground was worth more as a field. The roads between them are two lanes at best, walled on both sides once you are inside a village, and they climb and turn constantly, so twelve miles is forty minutes and there is no point pretending otherwise.

The first week of February is more often cold and bright than gray. Inland the afternoons run about 10 to 12 C and the nights sit near freezing; frost holds in the shaded lanes until mid morning and the north facing bends stay slick. Rain falls on perhaps eight days in the month. Around one week in three a dry north west wind comes down the Rhone valley and blows for three days without pausing, taking five degrees off the temperature and scouring the sky to a flat hard blue. The sun is up at about 07:45 and the light has gone by 17:50, which gives you ten hours and moves your day earlier than you expect. The summit road on Mont Ventoux, an hour north, is under snow and does not open until spring.

Two beds, eight nights

Eight nights and two beds. Five in a stone house on the lower edge of a village of about 1,400 people: a wood burner that is the actual heating, a kitchen with a real oven, one bedroom above the lane, and a church bell forty meters away that strikes the hour all night and does not care whether you sleep. Then three nights higher and further east in a hamlet holding perhaps 200 people through the winter, where the nearest shop is a nine minute drive and the terrace looks down a valley with nothing built in it.

From $2,120 per person. That figure covers both houses for the eight nights, linen, the end of stay clean, wood for the fire, and the arranging we do around them. It does not cover your own flights, the car, fuel, tolls, food or anything you drink, and we would rather you saw that gap now than at the end of the week. The move in the middle is deliberate. Eight nights of one window in February is a long look at one view; the second house is thirty five minutes away, so the change costs you an afternoon rather than a day.

Eight days, laid out one at a time

Candlemas is the second of February, and inland it is a domestic thing rather than a spectacle: thin pancakes at home, a candle lit in a window, the bakery selling three times what it sells on a Tuesday. The procession with the green candles that people read about belongs to a port city two hours south, and this week does not go to it. What the date buys is the fortnight around it, when the winter markets are at full strength and the villages are running for themselves.

Two mornings are fixed and both are cold. On the Friday, the market at Carpentras, which is large, and where in season a separate trade in truffles goes on in one corner before the rest of it opens. On the Saturday, the market at Richerenches up toward the Drome, which fills a hall for two hours, deals almost entirely in truffles, and is finished by half past eleven; arrive at eleven and you have arrived at the end. Everything else is yours. An abbey with a short winter opening. Two hours on a ridge path with an empty valley under it. A long lunch on the two days a week the village kitchen serves. A good deal of sitting still. Nothing is scheduled and nobody meets you at a gate.

Who this suits, and who should leave it

This is for two people who are content to be indoors by six with a fire and something to read, who can drive a narrow road with a wall on one side and ice on the other, and who want the place while it is doing its ordinary business. It suits people who cook, because in February the markets are open and many of the kitchens that serve the public are not. It suits anyone who came here in July and went home cross.

It does not suit anyone who needs to walk out of a door and find dinner: three evenings in five you will not, and we will tell you which three before you commit anything. It does not suit young children, since the fixed points of the week are two cold markets and a lot of quiet. It does not suit anyone who cannot manage stairs, because both houses are old, both have a steep flight, and neither has a lift. And if the flowering almond is the picture in your head, this is not the week for it; take one later in the month and accept a different set of odds.