Our Trip to Europe – October 2013

Our trip report is broken into sections, matching our itinerary.

Our agenda was ambitious: Vaucluse-Provence, The Riviera, Cinqueterre, Parma-Verona, Como, and Paris.

Our goals were simple – see new places; to eat, drink, and be merry; and to walk. We planned no museums, no cathedrals, only one special event (Jan’s 60th birthday). Our plan was simply to arrive, to explore, and to soak it all in. It was the right plan.

I learned from our Alaska trip: in retirement, you don’t need to rush. There is no quota of vacation days! A trip doesn’t have to fit into a defined period driven by entitlements or work schedules: you take as many days as one needs.

In the end, our itinerary required a full 22 nights, and that’s what we booked. The pace was just right.

Getting There

Crossing the pond was on schedule, tiring, and thankfully uneventful. After the overnight flight, we had a three hour layover at Charles de Gaulle before our TGV’s departure to Avignon.  The TGV is a superbly quiet and rock-steady train ride. The train ride was pleasant – but, coming after the flight and the wait, it was mostly just another spell of sitting in a seat. Our spacious first class car car was filled with dozing passengers, many like us just off transatlantic flights. We dozed away the three hours to Avignon in peace.

Avignon

Our adventure began in earnest as we rolled our suitcases down the ramp of the futuristic Avignon TGV station and found the shuttle bus to town. The bus driver gave us the ritual “bonjour, madame et monsieur” and we replied in kind…..this trip, we found we were much more comfortable conversing in both French and Italian, and our high school Francais came back readily.

Our hotel, Le Colbert, was just around the corner from the central bus loop. It was delightfully traditional and had a wonderful host. We hauled our suitcases up a classic French staircase to the top floor, opened the window to a classic French back-street inner courtyard, and smiled. Suddenly there was enough energy for a late afternoon stroll. We were there.

Avignon is a walled town dating from Roman days. It has two must-see attractions: – the famous Pont from the children’s song, and the Papal palace. The bridge was the creation of the town loon, and as is usually the case, the village idiot was a genius. Jan demonstrated her dance steps “sur le Pont”.

As for the Palace, it seems that Avignon was the Church’s capitol for a couple of centuries during the “papal Schism” a period where various personalities competed for the Papal title. When the Church returned to Rome, not much was left behind….the Palace lacks the opulent artwork and sense of spirituality of Rome’s Vatican complex. There is an upside, however….with no residual role as a place of worship, one can access much of the palace. There are plenty of nooks and crannies, equally suited for spiritual meditation and for whispered iniquity. We walked around, imagining who might have sat where,  to pray and to plot…..this period in Church history was known for both devotion and conspiracy.

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The greatest pleasure of Avignon is walking the streets. In the evenings, We noticed tourists, but the cafes and the streets were overwhelmingly filled with locals. In the evenings, the main streets were crammed with people….shopping, passing the time until dinner over drinks, and just hanging out.

Arles and Nimes

After a day of prowling Avignon proper, we took two daytime excursions to the neighbouring towns of Arles and Nimes.

Both are walled towns, dating back to Roman times. Both feature Roman Forums and battlements, nowhere near their original grandeur. Subsequent generations have neither restored the ruins, nor attempted to match them. So the Roman arenas and battlements tower over the modest streets and buildings.

As in Avignon, we found that tourism was prevalent and yet kept in harmony with the ‘real’ lifestyle. While there were bars and street buskers in all the predictable places, the attractions were filled with locals. If this was a synthetic tourist oriented rendition of French life, there were sure a lot of locals participating in it. For their part, the tourists seemed to be more knowledgeable and sophisticated than the group tours that pack Paris.

We toured Arles on a Saturday, when the Farmer’s Market was in progress. It was the largest weekly market we’d ever seen – easily a kilometre of stalls, all set up on the main drag, which was closed for the occasion. As the day wore on, it was obvious that the boxes of produce were emptying. Few tourists buy perishables, so clearly this was how the locals filled their pantries. Even the truck filled with cages of live rabbits and chickens appeared to be going home empty.

Arles

Nimes

As for trains, we found an interesting mix of standard trains, TGV’s, and those ubiquitous Bombardier DMU’s. SNCF is organized regionally, and each region has its own customized version of SNCF colours. There was lots of variety.

On our last day in Avignon, we took a day trip to Aix en Provence – on to Chapter 2