We were delighted to find the skies in Avignon clear, and the sun hot. Our hotel was basic, but their Tripadvisor rating came from how friendly the owners, Sylvie and Pascal were. When we asked Pascal about restaurants, he whipped out a city map and started writing down his recommendations; we took two of these on successive evenings, and both wound up numbering among our favorite dinners, first L'Epice and Love, and the second Le Chat Touilleur. Our first afternoon we visited the papal palace, where there happened to be a rose festival going on. I don't think I've ever smelled so many roses. I had the idea that I didn't like roses all that much, but it seems that only applies to the regular red rose type (they smell a bit like floor polish to me somehow); there were so many other varieties that had subtler smells, and plenty I wouldn't have been able to ID as a rose at all. Poor Sean has allergies, so he had to limit his sniffage somewhat.
We also crossed the bridge which is apparently famous as the subject of a French nursery rhyme, which all the signs referenced but of course we Americans don't know. I should say that Sean crossed the bridge. I made it out about a third of the way, but the wind was so powerful that I wound up huddling in the lee of one of the chapels built into the bridge while Sean sprinted across to the other side. (I had thrown on a dress when we arrived, excited to finally wear some of my nicer clothes, only to discover that I needed to wear my purse cross-body just to hold the skirt down as we walked around--and there were still some close calls).
This wind, the mistral, was certainly one of the most memorable features of our time in this part of the country. I'd read about its power in Julia Child's memoir; she lived for a time in Marseille, where the wind could hit 50 mph and strip the roof shingles off the houses, and that's when the sun is shining! We didn't see anything quite that strong, but the next morning, but when I came down on Saturday morning in another dress, and Sylvie heard our plans to visit Chateauneuf-du-Pape and Mount Ventoux, she told me to go change. Thank god for that, because the wind up on Chateauneuf-du-Pape (once the location of the Avignon popes' summer palace, bombed out in WWII, hence the name), must have been 30mph. I don't think I've ever felt anything that powerful in my life--it was like a hand in the middle of your chest, pressing on you as you tried to walk! It was exhilarating but shocking at the same time, a reminder that we're basically dry leaves to Mother Nature. We ended up scrapping the Mont Ventoux visit, because Sylvie had warned us it gets so cold up there at the summit that you can't even get out of the car for a picture. I admired it from a distance instead.
Speaking of the car, that was quite an adventure in and of itself. We had originally decided not to pay for a GPS, assuming we could do just fine with a map like we had in Greece, but we hadn't factored in how much more of a busy, populous, and complicated place southern France is, versus the provincial one-horse towns of the Peloponnese, where every place was fairly distant and had just a few streets to navigate. It was a stroke of luck that at the pick-up desk they offered us a car with an onboard GPS for an extra 10 euro a day; we took it, which was one of the best decisions of our trip! I have no idea how we would have survived without it, especially driving at night. Anyway, we got out to the parking lot and discovered we were driving a Peugeot 3008, which is one of those wagon-crossed-with-SUV type things. Much bigger than our cars, or the VW Golf we were expecting. I was driving first, so we hop in, fire it up, and then are immediately confused that there's no D for drive. Nor is there P, for park. (This despite the manual we whipped out, which assures us that even in a French car, there should be D and P). Instead, we've got Reverse, Neutral, and A, which we decide means drive. The car could only be started or turned off in neutral, which meant you had to use the parking brake as the primary brake. OK, fine. I take my foot off the brake, put it in drive, and the car absolutely lurches forward. I hit the brakes, which turn out to be so super-sensitive we're both thrown forward. WTF was that? I try ahead, slowly releasing the brake. Again, the car jolts forward entirely of its own accord. Now I was getting really freaked out, because the parking lot was really tight, and a woman returning a car in Hertz had mentioned how happy she was they'd chosen the extra coverage because her husband had damaged the car getting out of a tight spot. So I'm afraid to even touch the gas, if this is what's happening on its own. Of course by this time Sean and I are yelling at each other, and I'm convinced the car is a dud and we have to go exchange it. What a moment!
Finally, we manage to maneuver it out of the lot and onto the road, when we notice something else weird. When you slowed down to about 10mph or so, the car's engine just cut out. Absolute silence when you were sitting at a red light. Then, the light changes, you lift your foot from the brake, the car moves forward a bit on its own, the engine returns, you hit the gas, and--sluggishly--you accelerate. The answer to this mystery revealed itself in fairly short order, once I noticed the ECO sign light up in green on the dash every time the engine died out. It was a fucking hybrid car! Apparently the lurch forward was simply how the car dealt with switching from electric to fuel. We got used to it--sort of--but I would never buy that car. It was like driving a lawnmower when you had to switch gears, and the acceleration was pretty terrible. We later figured out you could turn off the ECO mode, but by then--having learned the price of French gas--we permitted it lunge forward from every pause. That's what we get for needing an automatic car in Europe, I guess.
From Chateauneuf-du-Pape we headed north to Orange, home to the famous Roman theater, which was very impressive indeed. I learned from the educational video that it's one of only three in the world to retain its stage wall, partially because it's been in continuous use over the millenia--not for long as a theater, after the Christians took power, but rather as housing! The exterior walls still had post-holes from where beams and lintels of adjoining homes were stuck in, and the interior of the theater was all shanties at one time. The didactic panels explained how in the 19th century, the well-educated, classically inclined folk of Orange decided it was time to reclaim the theater, by evicting everyone who lived their and destroying their homes, a 20-year process. Something tells me those people didn't appreciate the gesture.
We acquired some souvenirs in Orange: lip balm and face wash from a pharmacy. It's amazing the things you wind up needing to buy in a foreign country, no matter how well you think you've planned. We've got Turkish aloe, Turkish indigestion pills (acquired when Sean was trying to mime "sun poisoning/nausea" at the pharmacy), Italian Benadryl, and now things like French bandaids and tampons. For the latter, after a failed and awkward attempt to buy them at a pharmacy (where the pharmacist did not speak English, so I had to ask for "produits...feminine?" only to be offered, after she disappeared into the back for a few minutes, a sad box of maxi pads) we wound up at a massive Carrefour, which is basically French Walmart. When we walked in, there were patio sets to your left and a meat counter straight ahead. The French: just like us.
Our next stop from Orange was the idyllic "perched village" of Gordes, on the top of a very steep hill looking out over a picturesque plain, where Sean bought some lavender honey. (I don't know why people enjoy putting lavender in food; I'm not terribly fond of its smell, and in food it tastes like eating perfume, but people like lavender in Provence and so it was offered in everything--Sean's lavender ice cream in Arles was particularly gross, I thought). We had seen a couple of signs on our way in, one for an abbey famous for its lavender fields, and another for the "bories" village, little dwellings made of corbelled stone, which have appeared in France since the Bronze Age. We went first to Senanque, traveling down a mountainside on an insane switchback road. We arrived too late to visit the lovely Romanesque church, and the lavender fields were just barely coming into flower, but it was still extraordinary, one of the most peaceful places I've ever been, located in a little valley with virtually no sounds but the birds. It was easy to understand why the monks chose this isolated spot to pray and work their gardens. Monastic life wouldn't be much of a chore under that beautiful blue sky, in the shadows of those great mountains.
Our last stop of the day was to be the bories. We'd passed the entrance turn-off on our way up, so we thought we'd pop in quickly and then head back to Avignon. Ha. That entrance was merely a red herring. We had to drive some twenty minutes on one of the smallest roads I've ever seen, fearing desperately that we would encounter another car coming the opposite direction (there were pull-offs every few hundred yards for this purpose--not the only place we encountered this method of deal with roads that were created long before cars or even carriages). The Peugeot was not a small car, so it basically took up the entire road, which seemed to get smaller, and curvier, as we worked our way further into what the GPS called "zone not mapped". Finally we arrived at the village of the Bories, patiently waited for the families with kids to actually notice a car trying to maneuver around them in the tiny parking lot (I have never seen anyone with less self-preservation instinct than French children), pay a pretty hefty fee for the ticket, and head in to check out some Bronze Age stuff. Except--it's not Bronze Age at all! These particular bories were built from the 17th through the 19th centuries, as temporary shelters for men working far from their home villages. We felt kind of cheated at first, especially with the price of the ticket and the effort to get there, but climbing in and around the stone structures--which were held together without mortar, by sheer gravity--was kind of cool in the end. They kept everything in those stone huts--sheep, pigs, silkworms. The smell must have been intense.
In the guidebook, I had read about free car parking on the island in the middle of the Rhone river next to Avignon, from where a shuttlebus would drop you back at the city walls. We parked in a fairly abandoned dirt lot, caught the shuttle, and were back in the hotel when I started to freak out about leaving the rental car in that location. I realized that the free parking was probably great for day-trippers, but overnight, a new car, one that we were responsible for? Sean was willing to chance it, but my paranoia induced me to go back out at 9pm (it was basically dusk, the sun lasts so late), walk across town, look in vain for the shuttle, power-walk across the bridge, convincing myself I'm going to get murdered the whole way, race to the car, and park it in an underground, video-surveilled lot that costs 20 euro a day. Whew. That is, until we go to get the car out on Sunday, and discover that the sole pay machine is out of order, and then I read something horrifying on the board, that they are fermee--closed--on Sundays, and freak out. Our car is stuck in the parking lot! We're screwed! We'll have to take the train to Aix and Avignon! Then I saw someone drive their car in, which made no sense if the garage was closed. In desperation I hit the help button near the stairs, and explained to the guy on the other end that the pay box was broken. He told us to drive to the exit, and opened the gate for us remotely--so in the end, we actually saved 20 euro, a rare experience on this expensive voyage. (The garage was indeed fermee when we returned Sunday night, with a gate across the entrance; we parked in another city garage inside the walls inside, where it was only 10 euro a day, go figure!)
On Sunday we visited Aix-in-Provence, home to Cezanne. Most shops were closed, but there was a street market going on, at which we bought some delicious-smelling soaps. We decided to skip visiting Cezanne's last workshop in favor of driving to the lookout point facing Mont St-Victoire, one of his favorite subjects, which I could see in the distance as we drove in (its profile is very recognizable). This turned out to be another one of those tiny, seemingly-impossible-to-be-two-lanes-but-oh-my-god-it-is-why-don't-these-fuckers-go-slower roads, which we followed for twenty minutes or so up a mountain, only to arrive at the designated parking lot to find it 100% filled. And this was not a spot where you could park on the road--there was just the road, and then there was wall or slope or tree, no shoulder, no extra parking lot. We'd come all that way, feeling superior to the shmucks walking or pushing their bikes uphill, only to have to turn tail and go back! We couldn't even linger a minute in the hopes of a departing visitor, as there was were two cars right behind us, one of them a big van. We wished them better luck than we, and left. That's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned from travel: you have to be willing to let things go. Of course, that's not a lesson I was particularly interested in following in Paris when we arrived, haha, but by the time we were in the south my mood had evolved toward C'est la vie! Or, in more accurate French (and Julia's favorite phrase): tant pis!
From Cezanne we went to van Gogh in Arles, a much more charming and quaint city than Aix had been. We visited a very lovely church cloister, the Roman arena, the theather, and the cryptoporticus of the ancient Roman forum, which seemed the perfect setting for a Dan Brown novel. And, naturally, we took a picture of the Night Cafe. At this point we were fairly close to the seaside, maybe an hour or less, so we decided to go down to Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the site where Mary Magdalen and compatriots were believed to have landed in France. The single road south led us through the marshy Camargue, famous for its white horses, many of whom we saw in farms advertising horse trips on the side of the road. The other thing we noticed was that the northbound lane was positively jammed with cars--all French people headed back from the four-day weekend of Ascension (for a secular nation, they do love them some obscure religious holidays! Not even Italy celebrates Ascension). It was like Cape traffic, though we were luckily going the right way. We told ourselves we'd have to hang out in the town and have dinner, because there was no way we were sitting in that line on our way out.
Once in Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, which already had the signs of a beach town that has emptied out, we walked out on a long rock pier to look out at the Mediterranean, and then dipped our feet in the freezing water while I picked up some tiny seashells for my sister. We had dinner in what seemed to be a fairly touristy spot, looking out at the water, but which Sean insisted upon because it was the only place offering bouillabaisse for one, instead of for two (and I'm just not interested in seafood soup, sorry). The waiter, who had seemed kind of dismissive (and you know, French) for most of our meal, suddenly became our best friend once he saw that Sean had actually finished the entire soup--a feat he said few rarely accomplish, and which would please the chef mightily. Sean has now received this compliment from waiters on two continents! After that we headed home. It was almost 11, there was still a bit of light in the western sky, and I had Sean pull the car over so we could listen to the bullfrogs in the marshes. No street lights, of course, so it was just the soft darkness and the sounds of nature. It was beautiful. Sean gets kind of unnerved by the absolute darkness, though, so our stop was brief.
That was our Provencal adventure! The food was delicious, the wine tasty, and the people overall much friendlier than in Paris. The next day would bring us to Bordeaux on the west coast.
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