Posts Tagged ‘provence’
Jul 13th, 2007
Sketches of France, Pt. 2
As promised, here are the rest of the sketches I did in France. Yes, I know there aren’t very many of them, I all ready explained that.
This first one was done in the town of Gigondas in the Cote du Rohn region. I had a little bit of an obsession with the Plane trees.
Next we have a watercolor of the town square in Roussillon.
And finally a sketch of a coffe break in the old town of Nice on top and a schematic of our hotel room on the bottom.
So there you are, I hope you enjoyed them. Feel free to email me with comments or leave a comment using the link below.
Posted in France, Journal Entry | No Comments
Jun 6th, 2007
Back To Reality
We got home last night at around 10:30 after spending way to much time on planes and transferring between planes and getting to airports. The cats were very pleased to see us, but were well looked after while we were gone.
I have many thoughts on our trip and of course a couple thousand photos to troll through looking for gold. I’ll get started on that right away. I’ll post more about our trip (and perhaps a few of the small number of sketches I did) this weekend after I’ve had a bit of time to decompress and unpack and do all the returning to normal life things that one must do after a long trip.
Including starting the planning for our next trip: Mexico! But that trip is a long way off.
Posted in Journal Entry | No Comments
May 29th, 2007
This time from Provence
Hello all, sorry we've dropped off the radar but we've been moving around a bit and have been unable to get to an Internet cafe.
We are currently in Vaison-la-Romain and spent the day driving around the indescribably beautiful Cote du Rohn countryside stopping at a number of cute little medieval hill towns, not forgetting of course to do a little wine tasting along the way.
This morning we awoke to the sounds of the weekly market setting up in the square below our window. We bought a picnic lunch to take with us on the drive and ate it in the tiny town of Suzette on the side of a hill overlooking vineyards. The sun was out and shinning but the wind was blowing hard and threatened to carry away our lunch.
In the past week we have visited Avignon, where we stayed for three nights and used as a base to travel. We day tripped out to Pont du Gard, an old roman aqueduct, and Nimes where we rolled into town during the annul bullfight festival (not listed in any guide book, Gretchen). The town was hopping and we had a nice lunch of Paella for Irene and Gardienne de toreau (bull) for me.
Another day we drove to Arles and spent the day, and yesterday we visited the abandoned medieval town of Les Beaux, and the not so abandoned town named after my cat, St. Remy.
Well, that about catches you up. Tomorrow we head for Roussillon and the Luberon hill towns made famous (at least in the states) by Peter Mayle in his books about Provence.
Posted in Journal Entry | No Comments
Mar 16th, 2007
Winding Down
In two weeks we are headed to San Francisco where we will spend 10 fairly low key days and we are both very ready for a vacation because we haven’t had any extended time off since September.
Planing for San Francisco has been pretty minimal as it’s an entirely different sort of journey than the one we’ll be taking in May. This trip is all about visiting friends and family, relaxing and probably an excursion to Napa and Sonoma with a possible overnight stay in Calistoga. But really there isn’t much required in the way of pre-trip planning apart from the rental car and a few emails and phone calls to people to let them know we’re coming. And since I’ve put Irene in charge of finding us a place to stay in the wine country, my work is done.
Which is good, because most of my attention has been focused on France. And now with two months until we leave, the planning is winding down as the itinerary is fixed, the apartment in Paris and the car for Provence have both been rented, and hotels have been booked for Avignon and Vaison-la-Romaine. It remains only to book hotels for Nice and the Luberon (and I’m in the process of doing that) and to contact the apartment people and arrange the details of our arrival.
One thing that pleases me about this trip is that even though we will be packing a lot in, we won’t be switching hotel as often as we might. We will have a minimum of two nights at two hotels and three and four nights at the others. This allows us to feel like we have a little bit of a base from which to explore the area. The logistics were tricky at first, but I feel like of got everything pretty solidly nailed down.
I really do enjoy the whole planning process and lately I’ve been listening to the A Year In Europe podcast and dreaming about what it would be like to drop out of life for a year and spend it traveling. And although it doesn’t seem feasible right now, some day I would love to do it. Although I think I would probably broaden the scope a bit and make it more of a round the world trip.
For now though, I’ll just have to settle for the two or three weeks at a time we can manage.
Posted in California, France, Travel Planning | No Comments
Feb 20th, 2007
The Strange Economics Of Rental Cars
There comes a time when you find yourself at the whims of the strange and convoluted rules of the travel industry, in which logic not only doesn’t apply, but has in fact been taken round the back and beaten into the shape of white is black, up is down and frogs are allergic to the color green. And so the round shape of your trip must conform to fit the star shaped hole provided.
Our original itinerary had us renting a car for four days, but as it turns out, it’s the same price, or cheaper, to rent a car for a week. And so things are set in motion, plans are altered and new schemes are worked out to accommodate this new information.
On the whole, this isn’t entirely a bad thing. Now instead of spending two nights in Avignon and one night in Arles, I think we will be either spending all three nights in Avignon (because there is a definite advantage to camping out in one place and day tripping from there) or one night in Avignon and two nights in Arles (because I’ve read that Arles is more friendly for cars). Right now I’m leaning towards staying put in one place. But that could change.
The other change will be driving from the Luberon to Nice instead of taking a train, which will allow us to stop along the way if we desire and frees up all kinds of time schedule wise.
Posted in France, Travel Planning | No Comments
