Around in Circles, Ending Up in Avignon

On Thursday, July 30^th, we had our last breakfast at Au Point de Lumiere—again wonderful.  This morning there was pain perdu (“lost bread,” i.e., French toast).  Annie and Jean-Claude were surprised that our four nights were up and we were leaving that day, but, unfortunately, there it was in the book.  After cordial goodbyes, we loaded up Francois and headed west.

We would have to catch a plane at Lyon Airport the next afternoon, which meant that we would have to catch Friday morning’s 9:49 train from Avignon TGV Station.  We had tickets for that train (bought in Basel), though only one seat reservation.  When we had planned this trip, I had considered spending this Thursday night in Avignon, to be ready to take the train the next day, but Mary Joy hadn’t liked the idea of being in a big city, and she liked the idea of seeing the Pont du Gard, which was relatively nearby.  Not far beyond the Pont du Gard was Uzes, a nice, small town, where we could spend the night.  So we now had a room reservation in Uzes.

But this was somewhat worrisome.  In order to catch our train, we would have to drive more than 40 kilometers (25 miles) in rush-hour traffic, then drop off our car.  How long would that take?  To be safe, we would have to leave before breakfast was available at our hotel.  What if there was a traffic jam or accident on the two-lane roads from Uzes to Avignon?

At this point, if we had it to do again, we would spend the night in Avignon instead, but we were committed to the hotel in Uzes, so, using a combination of our Michelin map (332, Drome, Vaucluse) and the Google Map directions, we headed into Avignon, found our way to the ring road around the city walls, and then over the Rhone.  Given the fact that the walls were an obvious landmark, it was hard to get lost, but, still, there was one point in Avignon where I didn’t know exactly where we were and had to rely on the assumption that we were headed in the correct general direction.

Once on the other side of the Rhone, there were a number of points where we needed to change from one highway to another, but those didn’t prove to be difficult if we always kept heading toward Ales and Uzes.  On the way, we passed the entrance road to the Pont du Gard, but since Uzes was only about 20 minutes away, we wanted to get settled first, then come back.  Eventually, we got onto the D979 going into town, and then things fell apart.

I didn’t see where we were to turn off for our hotel, so we found ourselves going all the way into town.  This was a problem, because we didn’t have a detailed map for the part of town where our hotel was.  We looped around through downtown.  It was jam-packed with people and vehicles.  We tried to get back to where we had come in, but in the one-way streets and heavy traffic, we couldn’t find it.  Then we tried to find a place to park, to go to the Tourist Information office, but couldn’t find a parking place.  We saw a ramp, but it was full the first two times we passed, going around and around downtown Uzes.  When Mary Joy and our friend Michelle had been there, back in the nineties, Uzes had been a quiet, pleasant little town, not this madhouse.  That had been in June, not July.  Finally, the electronic sign at the parking ramp showed green, and Mary Joy asked if we should go in, but at this point I said no, because we had decided to give up, eat the hotel bill and go back to Avignon.  We didn’t know how much the ramp cost or how one would pay it.  We didn’t know if the Tourist Information office was open.  We didn’t have a working telephone.  We were worried about catching our train to Lyon the next morning.  We were rapidly losing patience with the whole situation.  So we got out of town and headed back east.  As we approached the road to the Pont du Gard, Mary Joy asked if I wanted to see it.  I didn’t really need to, but she said that it would be simple, just a matter of driving up and looking at it from the road, so we turned in.

When Mary Joy and Michelle had visited the Pont du Gard, nearly twenty years ago, it had been just a matter of driving up, but if we had read Rick Steves beforehand, we would have learned that that was no longer the case.  Before we realized it, we had taken a ticket from a machine and parked in a huge parking lot, next to an almost-as-huge complex of buildings.  No Pont du Gard in sight.

The Pont du Gard, by the way, is one of the most impressive remaining products of Roman engineering--a large bridge, carrying an aqueduct high over the river Gard.  In the 1990s, this didn’t require a huge interpretive center, with films and a food court, but that was then and this was now.  Mary Joy said that since she had already seen the bridge, she would stay in the car (more signs warning against leaving anything in your car), while I had a look.  At this point, all I wanted was to get out, turn the car in and find a hotel in Avignon.  However, our experience in Roussillon the day before indicated that I should go looking for a place to stamp our ticket, so we could get out of the lot.  I went up to the interpretive center, which was a set of buildings along two sides of a long central area.  At one end was the sidewalk from the parking lot.  At the other end was the path through the woods to the Pont du Gard.  I got in line for the ticket machine, where I stuck in my Visa card to pay 18 euros to get our ticket stamped.

Then I went back to Mary Joy and we left.  It turned out that, unlike in Roussillon, you could use your credit card in the machine as you went out.  This day was not starting out very well.
Along the way, we were held up for a few minutes by a traffic jam caused by an accident, which was still stopping traffic in the other direction as we left.  This reinforced our feeling that staying in Uzes would have been taking a risk.  Once across the Rhone again, we followed the directions given by Google Maps until the roundabout where those directions diverged from the sign that said “Gare TGV,” at which point I decided that we’d follow the sign and not the directions.  Immediately, it occurred to me that “TGV Station” was not exactly the same as “rental car lot just across the tracks north of the TGV Station,” and when we got to the front of the station we had to maneuver our way past and around various pay parking lots before we found a street under the tracks, just east of the station.

We parked Francois in the Avis lot and handed in the key.  In spite of the fact that it was around 2 p.m. and the car was due the next day at 1:00, they took a whole day off our rental.  In the beginning they had told us that before turning the car in, we could, at our option, either fill up the diesel tank or let them do it and charge us for a tankful.  We hadn’t quite used up a full tank, so we went for the latter option. 

In retrospect, paying for GPS along with our rental might have made things a lot easier.  On the other hand, GPS might have had as much trouble navigating this road system as we did, or it might have had as much trouble explaining exactly what to do as Google Maps did.  I don’t know.  In any case, just relying on printed-out directions from Google Maps was a disaster.   If we weren’t to use GPS (and even if we were), we needed to have much more detailed local maps, so that if we missed a turn, we could figure out where we were and how to get from there to where we wanted to go.

The next order of business was to find a hotel in Avignon.  The tourist information booth at the station was closed, so we asked at the railroad’s information booth, and they gave us a map and said that we should take the shuttle train in to the Avignon central station, then walk a few blocks north, to the main Tourist Information office.  So we bought our tickets and caught the train for the 6-kilometer ride into town.

The central station is across the street, south, from an opening in the medieval city wall.  From there it’s a walk of a few short blocks to the Tourist Information office.  They have a board showing hotels with available rooms, and we checked some of them with Rick Steves (I had torn the Lyon and Provence pages out of his 2013 France book) and Lonely Planet (still on the iPad).  When we reached the desk, the man there suggested some possibilities: we chose the nearby Hotel Colbert.  He called the hotel, and though he couldn’t make a booking for us, he could ask for availability and price.  There was a room available, the price was fine and the hotel was recommended by Rick Steves, so we thanked the man and went down to the corner, turned left, walked halfway down the block and there was our hotel.

The Colbert is a very pleasant little two-star hotel on a side street near the central station.  The owner has decorated it with posters for theatrical and film productions, mostly Polish.  He told us that the Poles do the best graphic art in the world, and that the theatrical bent of the art in the hotel related to the Avignon Festival (this year’s had just finished a few days before), which is primarily dedicated to theater.  Our room, up the staircase on the first (in the U.S., the second) floor had a small shower room, with odd, flashing, colored lights when the sink (blue) or shower (green) faucet was on.  The toilet was in a tiny, separate room.  There was a closet with a safe, and the WiFi was good, using an unusual password system.

We went out to see the city, going north up the rue de la Republique for about half a mile, until it reached the lively, pedestrianized Place de l’Horloge.  Then we walked past the Mercure Hotel to the Place du Palais, in front of and below the gigantic pile of the Palace of the Popes, the largest remaining medieval palace in Europe.

Avignon had its moment in history during the 14^th century.  As the Michelin Green Guide to Provence explains: “The court in Rome had become more or less impossible for the popes, who were incessantly the object of political differences.  The Frenchman Raymond Bertrand de Got, elected pope under the name Clement V (1305), decided to establish the court in France, where since 1274 the Holy See possessed the Comtat Venaissin [which surrounded Avignon].”  In 1348, Avignon itself was ceded to the popes, though they had already made it their seat, starting to build the Palace in 1334.  A succession of French popes reigned from Avignon until Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1376.  After his death in 1378, conflict between his Italian successor and the mostly French cardinals led to the latter electing a second, French pope, who returned to Avignon.  The Great Schism which followed led to there being two and at times three popes, all claiming to be the Vicar of Christ.  The schism was finally brought to an end by the Council of Constance, and all three popes were replaced by the newly elected Martin V in 1417, closing a century in which Avignon had claimed to be the center of world Christianity, with the pope, the whole papal court and all the economic, political and artistic baggage that brought along with it (such as the poet Petrarch, whose beloved Laura is supposedly buried here).

We went up the hill, the Rocher des Doms, to the north of the cathedral.  There is an outlook over the famous, broken-off Bridge of St.-Benezet, of the French children’s song: “On the Bridge of Avignon, there they dance, there they dance.”  At the top you turn into a pleasant park, with a pond and trees and benches, and children driving around toy cars.  We hadn’t managed to have a picnic the day before, so our cold meat and olives had spent most of the time since their purchase in the refrigerator in our room at Au Point de Lumiere.  Now they, and the small loaf of bread, came out and were eaten as we sat on a bench.  A yellow jacket wasp appeared and tried to get a share of our belated lunch, but we managed to gobble the meat up, whereupon the aggressive insect lost interest and disappeared.  It was a harbinger of what we’d run into in Berlin.

Then we went down the hill to the cathedral, but that appeared to be closed.  We decided that we didn’t, at this point, want to spend the money to go into the Palace.  We wandered around, following the Rick Steves book, visiting the Church of St.-Pierre

and in its square making a reservation for dinner at 7:30 at the restaurant L’Epicerie.  We followed one of the Rick Steves walking tours, into the old town, ending up at a water wheel on the rue des Teinturiers. 

We then went back to our room until it was time to go to dinner.

 At l'Epicerie, we had the usual bottle of mineral water, but decided to have a 25-centiliter carafe each of two different house wines, the red for Mary Joy and the white for me.  Not great.  We each had a wonderful mixed salad, with greens, tomatoes, grapes, apple slices, hazelnut pieces and maybe other nice ingredients that I don't remember.  Mary Joy's main dish was a lamb tajine, which arrived in a very Moroccan terra-cotta dish, with a towering cover and a terra-cotta bowl full of yellow couscous.  I had prawns (still in the shell) cooked in butter, with potatoes and vegetables.  For dessert, Mary Joy had a peach tarte tatin, while I had my third chocolate moelleux of the trip, this one, like the first, a small chocolate cake shell filled with a sort of chocolate pudding, but with a pistachio paste beneath.  Another exceptionally nice dinner.