France Day 8 Avignon – What Medieval City?

Last day in Nice but we don’t want to go.  We walk up to the top of the nearby castle.  At the top there’s a park and get some great panorama shots.  We get our last breakfast in the market, socca from the Chez Theresa stand and stuffed veggies from another, and have our final meal on the apartment terrace overlooking the sea.  Is the color even more vibrant today?

Pack up and hit the road.  It’s a three-hour trip to Avignon, so we break it up with a stop in Aix-en-Provence.  Aix is a hip college town with a 2200 year history and Roman roots.  It’s widely known as the birthplace and deathplace of the Impressionist Paul Cezanne.  We park near the center of town and walk to Cezanne’s home/studio about a mile away.  It’s a very intriguing place frozen in time, with many of his props and tools still where he left them.  We walk inside and out and see backdrops to some of his famous works virtually unchanged.

We pull into Avignon around 4.  I guess we should have known exactly what “walled medieval city” means, especially since we are staying inside one for the next four days.  It means that the buildings are literally ancient, but it’s still a living working city center.  There is a big tourist section with quaint shops and boutique hotels, but that’s not the entrance we drive through.  We drive through the one with the graffiti, tattoo shops and typical city blight.  We’re a little freaked out.  The streets, if you can call them that, are mostly cobblestone, terribly marked, hopelessly narrow, and follow no reason.  GPS cannot find our inn, or at least, cannot tell where we are in the bizarre labyrinth.  At one point we end up down a street so narrow (how narrow was it?) that the wheels of the Fiat touched both sides of the curb and both mirrors scraped the sides of a building all at once.  I thought it was going to make that cartoon squeeeezzzzze-POP sound.  Or at least I wasn’t getting my deposit back.  This is not helping our collective flip-out.  GPS finally says we have arrived, but it must be a wrong address because this seems to be some sort of odd religious store judging by the window display.  I’m trying to stay calm for Mandy while she is trying to stay calm for me.  We put in the other address we have for the hotel, squeeze through some now familiar alleys and get to an inn.  This can’t be it, I hope.  The sign is right, but no signs of life and some creepy, crazy-eyed bald guy staring out a second floor window a few very close doors away.  We knock and a woman answers.  She tells us that this is not the place where we are staying.  We’re staying at the sister property, so she calls her husband to let him know we’re close.  Breathing exercises.  Stress management drills.  Google Marriott.  No, not yet.  We drive back, and sure enough, we had the address right the first time.  To this day we do not understand the weird window display, because we never asked.

We check into our hotel, which is actually very nice.  Building from the 1600s, maybe older.  Maybe once was a cloister.  Hard to tell, because our innkeeper isn’t sharing.  The room is big by European hotel standards.  Seems like someone went out of their way to develop an inside-a-Van Gogh-painting feel.  Overlooking a really nice little private courtyard.  Luggage up, but we’re still rattled.  Do we want to stay in this neighborhood?  We decide to handle it the best way we know how.  Get a drink.  As it turns out, we are only about three blocks from the main square of the best part of the city and walk there in 5 minutes.  Plenty of beautiful sidewalk cafés.  Order the house red.  I get a second which is served with some of my composure and common sense.  OK, we’ll eat, stay tonight and figure out what we want to do tomorrow.

We call and make reservations at Estaminet Aromes et Tentations (E.A.T., get it?), which is rated among the top 5 in town. Fantastic food, creative, expertly prepared, beautifully plated, deliciously satisfying and light.  Very reasonable for the quality.  Excellent service, friendly server.  Maybe this town is gonna be OK after all.