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Published: August 6th 2008
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Provence canals
Miles and miles all over the place. The region was home to Vincent Van Gogh, with the picturesque villages, fields of lavender and sunflowers inspiring a great deal of his paintings. With this in mind Kathryn was rather disappointed when instead of lavender and sunflowers she got more vineyards. I told her to look on the bright side, wine was still cheap!
I really love the South of France! As with Languedoc, our drive to Avignon was memorable with tree-lined roads covered in shade from the canopy above and wide canals running along the sides. Avignon is famous for its Papal palace (The Pope´s lived here a couple of centuries ago after fleeing Rome) and more recently its annual Performing Arts Festival.
On the morning of our first full day in the town, I took a wrong turn and ended up driving through the middle of Avignon old town, not enjoyable in the least, but we managed to park without any catastrophe. Morning coffee in one of the side street cafe´s was greeted with acrobats performing headstands on bus stops and a jazz quartet drowning out the traffic with their Saxaphones. The view from the palace gardens looking out over the Rhone River was memorable, certainly
Road side cafe in Avignon
The performer is the 12 foot guy, in case you are wondering. worth a visit. We didn't go into the Palace, instead watching various street performers. Across the Rhone is a lovely park on the river bank where we took some great photos of the walled city with the palace and bridge which only makes it half way across.
The night at the campsite was spent fending off a ferrel pack of 5 year olds. The fact we had camped right in the middle of their self-claimed play ground and that we didn´t understand French irked them some what. The smallest and cheekiest one tried taking too us, but all we could make out from the hand actions was someone was guilty of peeing on our tent!!
We started our final day in the area travelling to the "Pont du Gard", part of a Roman Aquaduct in its prime was nearly 50km long. The "Pont du Gard" crosses the river Gard, is 270m long and 49m high. It was constructed, entirely without mortar, in the 1st centuary A.D. and could carry 20 000 cubic meters of water each day. Enough boring facts but pretty impressive don't you think?. We then travelled to Arles and Saint Remy. You can ask Kathryn
personally why we didn´t stop at Les Baux!! Both villages were quaint and we would have liked to have spent longer there. The highlights from our fleeting visit was visiting the Yellow house in Arles where Van Gogh lived, and is also one of his famous paintings, also seeing the Roman theatre still in use today. Saint Remy, much like Arles, was also the birth place of Nostradamus.
Before we arrived in Avignon we noticed road signs informing us of road closures on the 19th because of the Tour de France. What a pity that we litterally missed one of the worlds biggest sporting events by a couple of days! Driving along the twisting mountain roads certainly gives you a feel just how long and difficult one stage of the tour is, never mind waking up the next day and having to attack the next stage. The photos really dont do justice to how high the climb really is.
Lavender fields !!!!! Sunflower fields !!!! Now that we have found them we can´t get rid of them. Kathryn was in heaven and even risked a swarm of bees to have her photo taken in the field- notice the
Avignon street performer
Street performer abusing guys from the crowd. slight grimace!
As we weren't in any particular rush we detoured through the Gorges Du Verdon enroute to Castellane. The turquoise river running through the bottom of the steep gorge flowed into a large lake situated close to the hillside village of Monsiere Saint Marie - this village appears in the top 100 most beautiful villages in France and you can see why. The village has it all: set into sun burnt colour cliffs , a chapel built at the top and a bridge below with an enchanting waterfall cascading through the centre with shops and restaurants on either side providing the perfect place to relax in.
We spent most of our time lounging by the lake going for the occasional swim and putting all thoughts of a hike up the mountain out of my mind. Kathryn eventually dragged me away to go kayaking for some much needed excercise and to witness the river worn gorge from below.
The last day of driving!! Glad to avoid French drivers who may I add are truly atrocious. For all the sterotypes associated with the French, some I found true others not. We found the Fench to be more than
Pont du Gard
It looks bigger in real life! helpful, as for their reputation as bad drivers - never a truer word said. The 100 miles to Nice was a surprise as we expected the closer we got to the coast the flatter the land would become , this was not the case with mountains accompanying us the whole journey into Cagnes sur Mur and there were times when I really doubted the navigator aka TOM TOM. Our hire car was due to be dropped off at noon , we arrived at litterally one minute past only to discover that French offices closes between 12 and 2pm. The wait was spent at a cafe by the train station where our hand signals and bad French resulted in a very nice meal of a whole tomato stuffed with pork and rice ( we thought we had ordered a cheese baugette) The delay caused us to miss our train to Italy and so we decided to spend the night in Nice.
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