All Roads Lead to Rome , Or at Least the Next Ruin: Day 14 - Avignon to Arles - Hey Buddy, You're Going the Rhone Way - Rhone Source to Sea 2018 - CycleBlaze
All Roads Lead to Rome , Or at Least the Next Ruin: Day 14 - Avignon to Arles
Our last day of biking on this trip was everything we could have wished for. No drama, no heart pounding ascents or adrenaline producing descents, just a nice cruise through the countryside pf Provence, largely on our own, ending at a very chilled out hotel in a very chilled out city (as long as you avoided the Vikings ... they continue to maraud!)
More verbiage to come later, mostly in the picture captions ... we are in Geneva now several days later and off to dinner
After seeing what the Romans developed a couple of thousand years ago, and to see it now gone, with European Christianity eventually replacing it (but taking a loooong time to get back to the same level).it strikes me that most societies are fragile and somewhat ephemeral in the grand scheme of things... this song kind of says this to me.
Cheap philosophy done for the day, here's some pics to show what it was like.
Very easy cycling out of Avignon this morning on essentially deserted D roads
We decided to ride on D roads on the east side of the Rhone. The official EV17 route was on the west side of the river. I think either side would have been equally peaceful. The east side brought us to the village of Tarascon where this castle was perched beside the river
We found a boulangerie, still open, picked up our sandwiches and this delectable little number ... a caramel mousse covering a very light chocolate cake / brownie .... yum .... However can't say the same thing about the lady running the place ... first outwardly rude person we've run across on this trip ... some cyclist must have ticked her off at some point!
... after lunch, back to the castle. After yesterday's let down as Palais du Pape in Avignon, we were debating whether to go in ... but you only live once so in we went
... after the gift shop, the guest book, where we encounter this .... Our money was already spent so we just laughed. At least there wouldn't be a thousand other people milling around peering at their tablet screens ... this place was old school, a good old paper map and written descriptions
... and then some very cool graffiti. As with most French castles, they at some point were used as prisons. In this case it was used to house Spanish and Portuguese sailors. The walls in several of the rooms had pictures of various ships carved into them ... yes technically graffiti ... but now seen as historic artifact
... these interesting rooms were however interspersed with more emptiness (poor old Pam must have only gone to these rooms). In this one I'm about to receive my daily sermon.
Pam must have missed this one ... several of the rooms had local 'curiosities' displayed in them, as well as the ones collected over the years by the castle inhabitants. The Palais du Pape had something similar, but it was displayed in a way that tried to be serious ... this place looked like their tongue was firmly in their cheek
... and this one was the best ... of the castle stuff . I have no idea if this was real or not, but they had some suitable ghoulish soundtrack playing in the darkened room
.. we were led eventually to the 'local' contribution ... this looked like the elementary school kids having their go at making a curio cabinet ... nice work Elizabeth!
... and these ones deserve a special mention too ... This castle turned out to be way more fun than we expected ... maybe UK Pam's guest book note set out expectations so low that we would have found a bottle cap and cigarette butt interesting. We got far more than that though and left with big smiles
Once back on the white tiled roads of Tarascon, Kirsten came across an textile establishment that has been making iconic Provencal prints for two centuries
...and a very well preserved portal at St Trophime's church ... looks like the guy's on the right have a conga line going ... and having much more fun than the guys in the middle
Kirsten and I have always noticed that city work crews always had seven men to do the work of one or two. We always thought this was a union rule, but we just discovered that is by religious decree (and since I'm Canadian, I'll apologize if I've offended anyone)
