Gatwick Adventure

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My alarm went off at 2:20am, and that was the start of a long day. Our driver, Victor, picked us up in an old van at 3am, and we began the drive to Gatwick to catch our flight to Marseilles. I immediately noticed as we got on the freeway that the van was working awfully hard to get up to speed. About half way through the drive, the exhaust started smoking like a steam engine, and after a few minutes of trying to keep it going, Victor had to pull over on the side of the road. We were still 45 minutes from the airport, and it seemed like the van was going to catch fire any minute. He made a few calls, things were tense for a while, and eventually the manager of the touring service came in his small car and we piled ourselves and our luggage in and took off for Gatwick. By this time it was going on 4:15am. We got to the airport at 5am, checked in, and as we were making our way to the gate, heard an announcement that we needed to be boarding immediately. It was quite a distance to the gate (number 112), but we made it, the flight was 75% empty, and after a slight delay on the runway we took off, and landed in Marseilles just about on time. I hate to say it, but my first memory of this trip to France is a quite ironic moment when I was using a rather icky restroom at the airport, and having the guy (I don't know if he was a Frenchman or not) at the urinal next to me blatantly fart really loudly. From there it gets much better though. Patrick, who is hosting us for the next 5 days, picked us up and we were on our way towards Goult, a village not far from Avignon. At first I was seeing a lot of graffiti, and found that to be a surprise, but at the same time seeing neat ruins and cliffs and eventually, we came to his wonderfully beautiful village that is what you sort of expect Provence to be like. We checked into our very charming and lovely rooms, and had some local apple juice as we went over the plan for visit. Lunch at 1:30pm was smoked salmon, salad, baguette, cheeses, strawberries, vegetables, and wine. Good thing we had an hour break while our host prepared dinner for some other guests because the wine made me even sleepier on about 3 hours of sleep. We took a little walk for about 45 minutes just around the village, through the narrow roads with homes that often resemble castles on either side. Even though it was raining, it was still beautiful and we're all looking forward to better weather predicted for Saturday. Around 5pm, a group of American tourists on a walking tour of Provence stopped by at the restaurant downstairs and had wine and mustard tart, and we joined them for a little while until they left and Patrick began preparing our dinner, to have at 8pm. Meanwhile, Nancy, a PR rep for BMI arrived via taxi and after a big dispute with the driver about the outrageous cab fare, we all sat down for dinner (Nancy came to join us on the France leg of our trip and we fly back to Chicago with her she'll oversee us as we film the chef fix 1st class meals on the flight). Dinner was excellent, and we were joined by Babette, Patrick's wife. The French are wine and cheese pushers, and they also pushed excellent lavender ice cream on us that Babette had just made. We all went to bed around 10, the wine knocking us out quickly.

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Photos

my bathroom Provencal
stay tuned...in a future episode i flood the kitchen using this bathtub

my beds
i let the camera have a bed again