Friday, April 11, 2014 (Friends: I have not been able to get my blog to post. I am trying it without photos to see if that is the problem.)
We had a pretty uneventful trip from Portland to Amsterdam. We had been nervous about our relatively short connection time at Schiphol Airport, but it proved to be a needless concern. We were very efficiently whisked through security and passport control and were on our way to a different concourse. We arrived at our gate with about 10 minutes to spare before boarding. Whew!
We then flew south to Nice. We picked up our car and jumped onto the autoroute. The sad thing about the big "A" roads (besides the pesky tolls) is that you could be absolutely anywhere. It's just a big (not so) freeway, with cars buzzing all around you. But it was the appropriate choice for this leg of the trip. We had about 4 hours of driving ahead of us, even at A road speeds.
Our destination--Pezenas--required a bit more driver and navigator attention than was perhaps desirable, given our generally rummy condition, but we got to our hotel without incident. We were about 35 Euros lighter in our wallets, and our nerves were a tad frayed from our multiple confrontations with the pay stations. There really should have been a big sign on our car that warned other drivers away from following us into the pay lanes. We had hoped our new credit cards with embedded chips would do the trick for paying the tolls. Alas, it was not to be, though we tried valiantly. (We had been warned that this nifty new option for toll payments did not work in the south of France, but were still hopeful until a fairly agonizing first toll booth.) In the absence of that option, we just had to make sure we had lots of coin and paper Euro options for feeding the greedy machines.
The hassles of the road behind us, we found our hotel and thankfully checked in. Even though it was only 5pm, I was ready to call it a day. But after shaking off a little road dust, Jerry suggested a walk through our town of Pezenas. It was a "just right" idea. Such a historic and architecturally interesting town. Cobblestones, narrow streets, marvelous old doors--and every manner of ironwork on the balconies. Pezenas is very proud of its Moliere connection. Moliere lived and wrote here in the 1650's (!). You see reference to him here and there throughout the town.
After wandering and oohing and ahing until the appropriate dinner hour--8pm--we picked a charming little restaurant and sank into our chairs. We were served a whole fish of some sort. Our serving person boned it at our table--and a very impressive amount of bones it was. This was served with mussels and two grilled, local squid, which are about six times bigger than anything we would think to call squid at home. Being the south of France, our fish came with a yummy ratatouille.
We have not seen this region of France before. Though not far from Provence, the Haut Languedoc has a personality all its own. The A road may have felt like anywhere, but now we know we're not home anymore.
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