Katie's Great Adventure: Avignon

So I was supposed to get to go to a classmate's beach house in Spain this past weekend. Unfortunately, it fell through :( Too bad--it was the driver's spider mites needing attending to on a Saturday (good reason not to work with insects)! That would have been amazing. I tried to find something else to do and discovered that everywhere within reasonable traveling range had a 70-100% chance of thunderstorms. I don't usually trust weather forecasts, but most of the places I would go are best when you can just wander around, which would not be so much fun in a storm. Or even rain. But I finally saw that while Avignon had 100% chance of rain/storms Saturday, it was 0% on Sunday! So a classmate and I decided to go. I'm trying to see new places, but I have to admit I was in Avignon once before, in 2000. I didn't remember it well, but kept hearing how amazing it was and so decided to check it out again (PS same with Barcelona, only that was in 1997 maybe).

We grabbed an earlyish train so that we'd have a good chunk of the day to explore. The first thing I noticed when we got off the train was that they weren't kidding about Avignon being windy! The wind blew nearly constantly throughout the day. A serious wind too, in the 20+ mph range. But it was an absolutely gorgeous day with blue sky and white fluffy clouds.

This is the view from a tower of the Palais de Papes, which was our first stop. It was pretty cool-there were remains of a lot of cool frescoes on the walls (no pictures allowed) and the building itself was quite impressive.

My favorite part of the palace was the view tower, for sure. Panorama mode, earn your keep!

After the palace we wandered around for a while. Avignon is in Provence, and what I do remember from the previous trip was confirmed in the touristy shops-lots of the stereotypical but beautiful Provence yellow and blue cloth and tons of lavender products.

Then it was time for one of those lunch menus I'm so fond of--lamb and mashed potatoes both with garlic sauce, followed by a cooked pear with chocolate sauce, ice cream, and chantilly (a heavy whipped cream). Yes, the pear came with all three of those! Delicious. I'm not a pear fan, but it was cooked well and covered in three types of sweet :)

After lunch we wandered off to see the Pont d'Avignon from the song (pont=bridge, and there's a famous song called "Sur le pont d'Avignon"). It's actually called Pont Saint-Benezet, and it has a history of collapsing. They got sick of fixing it and so just turned the remaining bit into a tourist site. This is the view from another bridge just downstream (that you don't have to pay to walk on).

And back towards the city--told you the palace was big...

My favorite part of the day though, was the Jardin du dom (remember jardin=garden). Beside the palace is a large rock outcrop that used to have I think a castle on it, but is now just a huge garden way up on this massive rock. That's the garden at the top of the picture below! It was beautiful--great views of a lot of the surrounding area, plus just nice in itself. It was at about this point that my camera died... fail.

After wandering around the park for quite a while, doing as much window shopping as you can in Europe on Sunday and grabbing a beer in one of the main areas, we headed back home, but it was a great day trip. And now you get the rest of the pictures I really liked.