Exploring Avignon
Disclaimer: This day, Adam took all of the pictures. For some reason, I felt that I didn’t want to take out my phone all day. Later, Adams phone stopped working. Luckily he had sent me a few pictures before this happened, but most of the pictures are now lost. :(
Avignon is a smaller city with charming cobblestone roads and very European apartment buildings. This was May 1st which is Labor Day in France so we were expecting that not much would be open due to the holiday. (However, many things were open.) We had yet to find the town center but with some help from Google maps, we needed up in the right place. We walked for a bit, found a cafe to get a little quiche and coffee, and then headed to the center of the city.
At the center, we followed Rick Steves walking tour of Avignon. It is fun because we can read along and learn about what we are seeing around us. Avignon is known because in the 1300s the pope decided he didn’t like Rome and moved the Papacy to Avignon for about 100 years. This included building a beautiful cathedral which we had the please of walking through.
Before we were able to start the tour, we saw a parade in the distance. We thought it was a Labor Day parade so we went closer and tried to see what was happening...it was a protest! There had to be 1000 yellow jackets marching down the main road. I have never been to a protest up close and it was really powerful. We watched and took pictures for probably 20 minutes. Adam tools this really cool photo of a little boy at the protest too!
Finally we powered through the walking tour and ended up at the cathedral. Next to the cathedral was a cute little park that was a bit above the city. We went to the top and took some pictures while we looked out over the Rhone River. You can see me here with my Rick Steve’s book in hand while we asked some nice people to take a photo of us.
on the way up to the park, we saw some of the popes special vineyards. The pope loves wine! The famous wine region of Châteauneuf du Pape actually means “new house of the pope” in French. So this city has been famous since 1350 because of the pope being there for 100 years and we are still touring this cathedral that is now a museum.
This cathedral was an awesome museum! We had a “histopad” (iPad with lots of history?) and headphones and this tracked your location through the castle and told you where to go and what was what. The coolest part? You could scan into each room and the histopad would give you a 3D view of what the rooms would have looked like in 1352. This was absolutely incredible. I think we spent nearly 3 hours in this museum.
After the museum, I was super hungry but since it was almost 2:00, most places we’re closing. Lunch hours are strictly 12-2 outside of the main tourist area. Luckily, we found a little pizza place with one pizza left for us. After lunch, we followed Rick Steves “Back streets of Avignon” walking tour which brought us around to a few different spots but it was very short.
we headed back to the room for a bit, Adam took a nap, I went and had a drink, and then we wandered around drinking wine from the bottle and debating what to eat until it was actually time for dinner.
I don’t remember what we had for dinner without photos but I don’t think it was anything too special. I know at this point, we switched to drinking the house wine...no more fancy bottles! Highlight of dinner: creme brûlée for dessert with a glass of Sauternes.
