Our hotel is huge and impersonal, and feels like a giant boarding house. They don't seem to have nearly enough lifts for the number of rooms and it doesn't help that one of them seems to be permanently out of service. People get in lifts that are going up even if they want to go down, just so they can get themselves into the system. We're feeling brave, so we catch the metro to the Arc de Triomphe. It's in the middle of a gigantic roundabout, with twelve streets leading off it, including the Champs Elysees. I try to imagine our GPS trying to cope with this. I'd like to hear it say "in 200 metres cross the roundabout and take the eleventh exit". I then remember what it did to us and decide that I ... read more

We put the black out blinds in our room down by mistake, and wake up at 9am thinking it's still the middle of the night. We walk across to Old Lyon in search of somewhere to get breakfast. Issy's not keen to cross Place Bellecour. She says the en-tout-cas will get into her shoes and make her feet hurt. The square's enormous, and I'm sure they could hold multiple tennis tournaments here simultaneously if they felt so inclined. It seems that the good residents of Lyon aren't into breakfasting in cafes. Grabbing a breadstick and a few croissants from the local boulangerie and munching on them at the kitchen table must be more their thing. The next square on the itinerary is covered in grass. Wherever we've seen grass in French towns it's usually been accompanied ... read more

The GPS induced nightmare of last night is still raw, and I wake up still feeling brain dead. We decide that today we'll try to do very little. I tell Issy that I think that we should take a short drive to the village of Gordes which is about 25 kilometres to the north of Lourmarin. I'm not sure that this quite fits with her definition of doing very little. In her eyes I suspect doing very little entails not moving more than a few metres from a lounge next to the pool. The first part of the trip takes us through the forested hills immediately to the north of Lourmarin. We enter the very pretty village of Bonnieux, where the main street is only wide enough for one car, so we wait at a set ... read more

We had a big day yesterday so we sleep in. Breakfast is a bread stick and some croissants delivered to our room in a basket, and we again feel very French. I'm not sure why; based on last night's experience we can't even speak enough of the language to order basic food and drinks. We decide that today we'll go to Avignon. I decide to trust my sense of direction, so we leave the GPS turned off. Within a few minutes we turn into a side road and come to a dead end, so we decide to give it a second chance. It tells us to turn left, which we do, but it then tells us to turn around because we've gone the wrong way. That hammer that Issy mentioned yesterday would have come in handy ... read more

We decide to have breakfast down in the old town. It looked easy enough to find on the map but we get lost and end up in the port instead. We seem to have developed an unfortunate talent for getting lost here. We walk past a large war memorial carved into the rock and then up Castle Hill for views along the seemingly endless beach. The hilltop is a mass of botanical wonders around the ruins of the old city walls and an ancient church. On the way down we wander through a very sad Jewish Cemetery dedicated to victims of the Holocaust and French Resistance fighters. The narrow streets of Old Nice are lined with expensive looking cafes and boutiques. Issy left her sunshade back at the hotel, so she goes into one of the ... read more