KYQ4: Avignon and the Gard

Palais des Papes, Avignon

When in France we normally head for the Ardeche but our late booking for flights required us to find alternative accommodation for the first week when our usual accommodation was already booked up. We decided on a gite about 15 kilometres from Avignon in the wine-growing area of the Rhone Valley. Leaving Nimes after a morning exploring the town and enjoying a salad lunch was not easy. The satnav on the car constantly calibrated to select the autoroute contrary to my instinct to find quieter routes through the glorious limestone country and perfect old Provencal villages. I switched off the satnav and asked Aileen to navigate me out of the town and to head north to Usez. We meandered along roads that tunnelled through plane trees and were menaced by fast vans on narrow roads with precipitate edges. The landscapes were a melange of vineyards, forests and fruit trees with limestone escarpments providing the third dimension. The afternoon heat had soared to 38°C but it would get a lot hotter as the week progressed.

The gite in St Laurent des Arbres was in a village that boasted two boulangeries, two restaurants and a fortified church with a watchtower. It is situated amidst some attractive pine forests and vineyards. We had brought some food so settled down to enjoy the pool, the balmy evening and the chance to recharge our optimism after suffering Boris Johnson's largely successful attempt to convert the UK into a rogue state.

We indulged ourselves with some lazy days in the sun, reading, swimming, enjoying our daily bread, eating melons, apricots, peaches, salads, and cheeses and drinking litres of cold water as the mercury danced into the forties. We visited the village of Chateauneuf du Pape just across the Rhone. After lunch in the village, a climb to the castle gave a splendid view of Mont Ventoux. A well-presented tour of the wine museum explained the importance of soils, climate and the balancing of grape varieties. We went to Uzes on market day, and amidst the curios and antiques we heard a superb rendering of Summertime, but parking wasn't easy. On the hottest day, Bastille Day, a walk in the nearby pine forest was our morning exercise and after the heat began to subside we climbed to the Castello in the nearby village of Saint Victor da Cost which gave amazing views across the Gard and generated an appetite for an evening meal in the village square.

It was the Festival d' Avignon Festival in July, an Arts festival that began in 1947, the same year as Edinburgh's festival. Avignon is a tourist hotspot at any time of the year but becomes even more so during the festival. There is a very efficient park and ride from a large free car park on an island in the river Rhone into the walled city. We arrived sufficiently early to enjoy time walking around the pedestrianised city and listening to some fine street musicians. We revisited the wonderful Palace des Papes which is a well-curated experience made even more so by a quite remarkable exhibition by the photographer Sebastiao Salgado that captures the landscapes and indigenous people of Amazonia. It worked as both a photographic experience and as irresistible evidence of the need for action to tackle climate change. We had some lunch and continued to soak up the atmosphere of street theatre, there were dozens of shows to see including a French take on Brexit. The street performers seemed more laid back and less aggressive than those that take over Edinburgh during its festival. There was a sense that the festival is better integrated into the community than occurs in Edinburgh.

We visited the quirky Chateau de Bosc, a wine estate near Pont du Gard that hosts a museum displaying an extensive collection of bikes, motorbikes and toys as well as having two retired fighter planes adorning the vineyard. The museums were a revelation with a Vincent Black Lightening motorbike that conjured up a favourite track by Richard Thompson. Even alongside some remarkable motorbikes from Germany, France, Italy and the United States, the Vincent looked to be the adonis of motorbikes.

The were numerous wooden bikes from the early nineteenth century and steel bikes from the early twentieth century on display but the star exhibit was Jaques Anquetil's bike from the 1963 Tour de France. I had been captivated by this race as a teenager when Anquetil began to go head to head with his great rival Raymond Poulidor in the days when French riders dominated Le Tour. I was desperately keen to have a racing bike with the components on Anquetil's bike: ten Campagnolo gears, Mafac brakes, Mavic wheels, Cinelli handlebars and Christoph pedal clips. They were fitted on racing bikes by Mercian, Holdsworth, Claud Butler and Bob Jackson that were readily available in the UK and common in the school bike shed. In those days the top cyclists were cycling on bikes that could be bought in local bike shops. Levelling up was innate in those halcyon days not a slogan in search of a solution.

We left the gite on a Saturday, thanking our host Charles, who had a great back story. He had been brought up in the Congo in Africa and after moving to France developed a successful textile company that exported to all parts of Europe and Africa. The arrival and domination of imports from India and China at the time of the banking crisis persuaded him to sell his business before it went bankrupt and move to the Gard where he ran a gite along with some rooms and enjoyed a less stressful life with a far smaller carbon footprint.