Avignon and Orange

Day 5 - To Orange by way of Avignon

We left Goult and drove the short distance to Avignon. On the way out, we paused to photograph the local toilets just outside the hotel gates and next to the bus stop, which I'd noticed the night before. It brought back memories - I came to appreciate squat toilets from living in Japan, but when I was a child travelling with my parents, the French and Italian ones I encountered caused me substantial angst. They're hard to deal with when you're small and uncertain of your footing. I liked that they still had them here in Goult, though. It seems civilized to me to have free and accessible public toilets that can easily be kept clean-ish. Frankfurt is short on such things, rather like London.



The approach to Avignon is off-putting, with American style highway and sprawl, and gangs of people descending at the lights to wash your windscreen whether you want it done or not. Once we'd struggled to the historical centre and managed to park it turned out the be a pleasant place, though.

We parked close to the famous bridge, which for all its fame and song I hadn't realized would be missing a big chunk. How's that a bridge? It should clearly be called the Pier of Avignon. I was almost as disappointed as when I first went to Covent Garden and there was no garden, or Crystal Palace... or the beautiful winding silvery Serpentine that turned out to be nothing more than a muddy duckpond (it appears that London has produced a disproportionate share of disappointments for me).



We saw the papal palace from the outside, having been advised by my parents that it wasn't the most exciting thing to visit. We went to the Musée Lapidaire with its interesting collection of Roman, Egyptian and Romano-Gallic artefacts, and also visited a couple of bookshops.

And we crossed some roads...

In the afternoon we drove off (and then drove off again when we accidentally ended up back in the middle) to go to Orange, where we'd booked two nights at the Hotel Kyriad Orange Centre. This was an odd hotel - the room was probably the nicest we stayed in of our trip, modern, spacious and clean - but the hotel itself seemed to be disintegrating a little (or perhaps it was only the roof). Our room was also full of more mosquitoes than I've had to spend the night with since Taiwan, for some reason. We spent a good long time both evenings and in the middle of the night hunting them down - and all of them already full of (presumably) our blood.