FRANCE February 2012: Part 2

Bonsoir

Very long and busy days…In fact, it’s now after midnight on Thursday and when I finish this note I’m headed to bed (have to be up at 5 am to catch train to Nice to fly back to London — long story).

Wow – where to start.

We’ve had several wonderful days exploring Provence towns, and Avignon itself. And I’ve been leading a total double life: from 9am until 6pm driving around, visiting medieval towns within a 40 mile radius of Avignon; from 6pm until dinner and then from dinner until about 2 am catching up with the office, and doing my share of projects.. So I feel as if I’ve been gone about a month! I’ll skip the work details and just focus on Provence and our experiences.

For those who have been asking, we never did move into the house in Vaison. We’ve stayed here at the Cloitre Saint Louis in our little loft rooms and it was probably the right decision. The frozen pipes did get fixed, but we had to make some decisions or lose the good rate we had at the hotel and risk not having a room at all. So, that was what we did.

Over the past days we visited Gordes, Vaison, Cairanne, Sablet, Seguret, Orange, and others.. We’ve had great dinners, good wine, good conversation.. and some funny (and also some annoying) experiences. I’ve been doing the driving and it’s been fun, especially since Carol is a good navigator! I had actually been to most of the towns we visited in the past, but it was fun to see them again (and feel like I knew my way around a bit) and also to see them in the winter without any tourists…  Ah, no tourists.. but the tourists have been replaced by freezing cold, and today a real mistral, with winds howling through the night at 70mph. It’s been really, really, really cold.. traces of snow are along the roads and fountains are frozen.. Once the sun comes out, it’s really beautiful with crisp, clean shadows.. and it even feels tolerable (in fact today was about 9 degrees — a true heat spell), but the wind is the killer.

That said, we’ve been real troopers and haven’t let the cold keep us down!

We managed to reach the famous market in Vaison just as it was closing (not sure how that happened); we almost couldn’t get our car out of a parking lot because the toll machine failed and it just wouldn’t register that we paid (wound up having two technicians come to try to help without success, and finally someone had to escort us to our car and manually open the parking lot gate; finding hats has become a bit of an obsession, but alas neither of us is returning with a warm hat; and so it goes.

We drove to Vaison and we think we found the house that we were going to stay in, which looked wonderful. But in some ways staying in Vaison would have been difficult (even had the pipes not frozen). The beautiful medieval town is really shuttered closed in February — the hotels were closed; no restaurants were open; nearly all shops were closed for the season; and we didn’t see a single person walking around. We would have had to rely completely on the “new” part of Vaison and that would have made things hard. For some reason, Vaison was more shuttered than any of the other towns we stopped in. The others had shops that were open, restaurants were functioning.. and people were clearly going about their business in spite of the cold. Even Cairanne (where Mike’s brother has a house) which is much smaller than Vaison, was more alive — restaurant open, shop open, etc.

But, I think the most memorable town of all was Gordes… about 40 km east of Avignon (which Mike and I visited more than 30 years ago, because I wanted to see the then-recently opened Vasarely Museum) …

It’s a spectacular town rising above the village area of Luberon. The village of Gordes is located on a giant calcareous rock that dominates the valley.  Gordes is home to a castle that was rebuilt in the early 1500s.. and a Romanesque Abby which we visited (and which is completely surrounded by fields of lavender (of course not really evident at the moment in the freezing cold) and the Village of the Bories… ancient houses made only of stone… The huts were built using locally extracted, 10 to 15 cm-thick, pieces of limestone. While they were built as early as the 7th Century and were inhabited as recently as the late 1800s. We also

We’ve also pretty much walked the entire interior of the ramparts of Avignon.. today (Thursday).. through the streets and squares of the medieval ville historique (where the hotel is located). .. strolling through and around the palais, through the narrow, winding streets, in and out of shops (naturally!), stopping for an occasional chocolate, and ending up at the Hotel Mirande (a former residence from the 15th century meticulously restored and maintained) for high tea. We stumbled on a little shop called George.. sort of like a little atelier… Carol got a great coat (perfect for LA?!) and I got a sharp vest. We both got broches (“for humanity” as George explained — I think they are made in a developing country and the proceeds go back and the shops that sell these things don’t take any money). Anyway, the clothing was all handmade (by George) and quite unique (and importantly, quite inexpensive for France).

For the foodies among you, we’ve had all our dinners here in Avignon, but lunches en route to the various towns. The hotel restaurant at the Cloitre was actually quite good the second try (maybe it had to do with the selection). We ate at a restaurant called 83 Vernet and another one called Numero 75 (They seem to have a think about naming restaurants with numbers.) Both were on the high on the hip scale, small, with limited menus that changed nightly — but quite good — sort of nouvelle French (and maybe with a touch of Asian). We also had a great pizza and salad in a cute little cafe in Gordes, Casa Rosario, just off the main square (and were served by an adorable young French guy who managed to tell me — when I mentioned that I had been to Gordes 30 years before — that he wasn’t yet born at that time).

Tomorrow morning — at the crack of dawn — we are taking the TGV from Avignon to Nice, where we will get a plane back to London (where Fed Exes await with work from the office, and where I’ll settle into a bit of a routine and prep for Monday’s meetings. The decision to take this rather circuitous route to London was the result of getting to London a day early. It all started with an effort to stop in Paris (to have lunch with my god daughter) en route to London. To make this happen, we went to the train station in Avignon — and discovered that to change just the time of the ticket (keep day the same) would add about $100 to our tickets; to change the day — which is what we really wanted, so that we could add a day to London and shorten the France part by a day — would add about $400 to each of our tickets. So, after much searching, we found a flight from Nice to London that cost less than the train tickets we had purchased. This would get us to London a day earlier but would not enable us to stop in Paris. (So, now a reason for another trip?) We figured we’d drive to Nice (which of course is in the total opposite direction of where we are headed) — a 3 or 3.5 hour drive. A few hours after making this decision, I began to think that after only 4 hours sleep, a three hour drive didn’t sound so great and looked into trains.

The Avignon to Nice train seemed like a good option. So I’m signing off now to get a few hours sleep before taking the train.

Bonsoir

Fern

PS –Didn’t get to push “send” last night… so now I’m back in London..after taking train from Avignon to Nice and then taxi to Nice Airport and flight to London/Heathrow (couldn’t get anything to London City Airport) and then train to Paddington and taxi to hotel.. Piece of Cake!!