Three for three. With the exception of the worn charm of my room in Nice and the monastic cell in St. Tropez, I’ve had the great good fortune of staying in pantheons of modern design. My hotel in Avignon(taking 45 minutes to find this time as Avignon is larger, more complex, and a nightmare for cars) was perfect. The hotel began its life as a Jesuit school in 1589, acted as a hospital during the French Revolution and added an ultra-modern wing, architected by Jean Nouvel, in 1991. There is no incongruity and the experience of going from the old to the new is seamless and nearly preordained. I was to retrieve my friend Colin from the train station that evening at 9, so I had the day to explore. I wandered town, which was a bit larger than I’d thought and quite lovely. The entire old town is surrounded by a 20 odd foot tall wall and though cars are allowed in, the streets are very narrow and pedestrians rule. The town housed the seat of the Catholic Church in what? the 16th century and the Palace of the Popes is a centerpiece tourist attraction. Much of the central artery running through the town is a pedestrian walkway populated by cafes and a steady flow of tourists. It’s a town where you could almost get lost if you wandered enough, but not quite. I wandered, took photos, wrote, and stopped back at the pad for a quick nap before heading to the TGV station.
The next day Colin and I wandered together, covering much of the same ground I’d covered the day before, but adding the gardens beyond the palace whose perch offers a beautiful vantage point from which to view the bridge of Avignon. My time with Colin was to be a time of bridges. We saw three famous ones, and it became the time bridging the beginning of my trip where time stretched endless before me, and the end, where I began to be aware that eventually I had to stop living this dream and return to life as I knew it.
The next day we set off to visit some vineyards and successfully tasted and purchased some lovely wines. Even with all my time in California, I had never been on a vineyard tour. At this point, my experience with visiting vineyards amounted to a viewing of _Sideways_ (which my restaurant friends assure me created a laughably ignorant hoard of newly minted wine snobs who are dying to tell you about how thin skinned the pinot noir grape is). I still don’t have the hang of it but it was all very non-commercial and we were able to taste anything we wanted. I managed to conduct all exchanges in French, purchased a couple of bottles at each and have no idea how the heck I’ll get anything back in my already overstuffed suitcases.
After the vineyards, I broke my one thing a day rule because we were very close to the Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct whose image graces the cover of at least 30% of all Western History textbooks in the world. It was a lovely ramble out and around it and it was that thing you’ve seen so many times reproduced, right there in stone. Knowing that in two days I would see what one of the greater feats of modern bridge building, I appreciated the contrast. After much picture taking and a fond call to our friend Tim, we made our way back to Avignon for a final dinner in our favorite café (with the greatest server of all time, Iman) and a planned departure for Arles .
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