Thursday 15 May 2014

Late start so we spent the morning having a clean-up before walking into Avignon. We had excellent views from the campsite entrance of the “Pont d’Avignon”, the old city walls and the Palais des Papes before crossing the river to explore further.

Palais de Papes

Pont D'Avignon

Much of the original bridge was repeatedly damaged before finally being destroyed by floods a long time ago, but the remainder is remarkably well preserved – as it should be if they’re charging €7 p.p. to go onto it! We’ll satisfy ourselves with photos thankyou very much!

Palais de Papes

Le Petit Palais

Inside the walls we explored the narrow lanes to the square overlooked by the impressive Palais, joining coachloads of American tourists and English and French school parties. Being a little later than planned, we decided to put off the tour of the Palais and set out to explore more.

There is a little tourist train but unfortunately it was full. Avignon is not very big so armed with a town map we set off along the one main street (Rue de Republique of course!) past lovely old buildings, many converted from churches into a myriad of museums, as well as shops, cafes and restaurants. We weren't impressed, however, with the supposedly Art Deco theatre which had suffered with unsympathetic additions. The walls completely surround the old city, broken only fairly recently in one place at the Porte de Republique, but being quite narrow are not walkable. Impressive, but not really meant to be very defensive as the Palais and associated buildings are themselves very well fortified.

Porte de la Republique

Returning north through some of the small side streets, armed with welcome – but expensive – ice-creams, we made our way up to Rocher des Doms, a park situated on the highest point of the old city which gave us excellent views of the surrounding countryside. But it was still extremely windy, from the north still and we believe it was possibly the Mistrale, a weather phenomenon that affects this area in spring-time. But it wasn’t cold.

Looking north up the Rhone Valley

Starting to become foot-weary, we made plans to return tomorrow to ride the tourist train and visit the Palais des Papes, then wandered back to Bertie for a welcome cuppa and a quiet evening. Apart from the wind, that is, which is still blowing a full gale noisily through the tree tops.