Where One Of Us Took A Train Ride On A Historical Train, And The Rest Of Us Wandered Around Avignon, Bought Stuff And Had Gelato
Amazingly enough, we only have 3 more days to go on our Excellent Adventure. Things are settling down after days of confusion and constant changes. Lisette promised us that Friday and Saturday’s schedules will be as originally planned.
Today, Thursday March 24, was supposed to be the Big Day for the strikers all over France. Fortunately, it turned out not to be much of a disruption for us.
Andy went off on Option 1 (see yesterday’s post) – he boarded a bus for a 2 hour drive to ride an historic steam train. Many people opted to stay on the ship and sail back to Avignon – which is what Susie, Janet, and I did.
This gave us the opportunity to be our on the bow to watch the ship go through the lock. Apologies for the glare on the photos – for some reason there’s very high, clear barriers between people on deck and the actual prow of the ship. Something about safety.
After we left the lock, the ship continued on to Avignon and docked.
After lunch, we brought the street map provided by the front desk with us, and off to the city we went. It was a very easy and simple walk – straight off the ship, cross the street, and continued straight into the old city via a pedestrian tunnel.
I don’t know how I missed taking a photo of the main square. But we’ll be back on Saturday, so I’ll get some then. Here’s some photos of side streets.
Wandering is hungry work, so we stopped to replenish our strength with gelato
Refueled, we returned to wandering and shopping. We all found stuff to buy, no surprise there. To me, the old city of Avignon had a Venice-like feel to it, only with random cars showing up at inconvenient times, forcing us off to the sides or sidewalk (if there was one). Around 4:00 we headed back to the ship to make sure we were back in plenty of time before the ship was scheduled to depart for Arles.
In the meantime, Andy was having his own adventure. He actually caught a glimpse of protesters.
Andy enjoyed the views from the train.
His excursion included a surprise stop in Tournon on the way back. Andy found his happy place there.
We were all back by 6:00. At 6:30 Lisette reviewed the schedule for the next two days – the original schedules for Friday and Saturday are in full on! We are now back on track.
After dinner, we played a music game, where we had to identify the song, the artist, the decade, and the nation of origin of the artist. Awesome game! We did really well! Though we didn’t win, we all had a blast. Tomorrow night, local artists will come on board to perform.
Tomorrow: Arles. {Side note: I knew that the actual correct pronunciation of “Van Gogh” is not “Van Go”, but it turns out the actual correction pronunciation is way worse than I thought: Van Khuckh, with both “g”s replaced with the guttural “kh”, kinda like the “het” or “chaf” in Hebrew. Yeah, let’s go back to “Van Go”}
Maryland Meshugas 