Day 6, Avignon.

Confusion alert: as I was reading through the post of the first and second days, I caught a few errors I tried to fix. The fix itself deemed successful, however it reposted as the newest post. My apologies. From now on no matter how tired I may be, a final proofing is in order before the "publish" button is struck.

Ok! That's out of the way. Here is what I love about Avignon:

1.) The weather-- 85 degrees today with a breeze off the Rhône = heaven.
2.) The coffee & croissants. We stopped at two pain au chocolat today...two EACH, that is.
3.) The people. Every place they are more than nice and very helpful. And they give me an endearing smile when I say anything in their mother tounge.

Our full day in the city included round one of cafe au lait and a pain au chocolat, where TJ proceeded to put the whole croissant to his mouth to take a bite. We may be in France, but we are American! There'll be no ripping of petite bite size pieces here!

We routed our trip with our tourist map to the Palais Du Papes, where we walked through a thousand year old alley to the sound of accordion music bouncing off the ancient brick. TJ had a lovely sentiment about the city as we strolled past some Roman ruins: this city smells like a perfect mixture of flowers, cigarettes and poop. He's right, pretty much.

We wandered our way through and up to the top of the Rocher Des Doms. Basically an English style garden on the north side of the Palace of Popes, leading us right to the Pont D'Avignon. I think this was my day's high light. Got to walk all the way out on it, which stops half way through the river. The whole time singing, "sur la pont d'Avignon...l'on y danse l'on y danse!"

We decided to take a pit stop before actually entering the pope scope. Originally stopping for ice cream and coffee, it quickly turned into veal tartare and an espresso. Quite a lunch, and I'm proud to say we cleaned the plate. Truly it's hard not to when they practically serve you a side cup of melted extra salted butter sauce. I'll eat anything with that on it. Including a pile of raw veal.

After a rejuvenating 10 minutes in our air conditioned room, we hit the palace. And apparently, so did about a million other people. What a sight to behold though! What amazes me the most of monuments like these is the man power it took to build it. There was no computer program to make sure everything was going to work, or a crane for heavy lifting. These buildings are a miracle! I'm always impressed with such work.

We hit a church called the St.Pierre on our way to get a glacé after the palace. The church was typical of whatever era it was built, with statues and a lot of gold plated items. We put in 2€ in the slot and each lit a candle. Mine for those I've lost, TJ a candle for himself. I don't know if he got it. But that's fine.

I got in some speed shopping after walking Teej back to the room to sit in our human sized meat cooler with a comfortable bed and television. It was fun to do a little self wandering, that's always a high point for me in my travels. No one to ask but yourself, where you want to go or what you want to do.

We finished our evening early tonight, with a bed picnic of divine cheese, dried meat, a baguette, red wine for me, Orangina for T (or orange-vagina as he calls it), and the second round of pain au chocolat. I attempted a shower, but ended up just sitting in the tub with the shower sprayer and a glass of wine. It's uncertain the level of cleanliness that was actually achieved, but I feel clean, and that's good enough.

It's 11:30 pm, there is a French documentary about Mozart on tv and the sound of Tj playing Angry Birds in only underwear is the secondary noise.

Tomorrow is the train to Nice.

Á demain!