The blog is evolving!

Stay tuned for new features including journey maps, some missing posts, linked photo albums, minor tweaks and ultimately... the earlier trips...

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Day 15 - FR

Cookie says...
It's nice to know that you're staying in the same place for more than a night and you didn't have a timeline to make it to another place. We did however have a timeline to meet Bronwen. I hope she doesn't mind joining a bunch of people aflicted by the plague. Since we've been here, all of us have been crook.

Bronwen also suffered poor connections (it must run in the family) and a flight crew who didn't want to work. It ended up working in our benefit as we had headed to Arles to look at a Roman Amphitheatre. As a Roman ruin, it's in reasonable condition however as it's an arena that's still in use, it's covered with scaffolding, walling and it detracts from it. I guess that it made up for yesterdays winner. We also saw some kids doing parkour in the ruins of the Roman theatre.


We discovered another 'hazard lights make it okay moment. Some guy in the toll plaza left his car to find help. We think he didn't have a ticket so we don't know how he got onto the motorway in the first place. The plan was to check out Nimes and it's amphitheatre but in the interests of time and this morning's visit, we headed to a Roman aquaduct.


Bronwen was finally arriving in Avignon via train so we did a grocery shop, picked her up and headed home.

Julie says...
Is it a bad sign for my marriage if I get a little over Cookie's desire to see Roman architecture? Maybe I'm not as 'cultured' as I claim, but I swear all roman ruins look the same. But, in the interest of supporting my husband, I headed off to see some old rocks again today. The wind decided to include a chill factor, so that forced Pilty to wear something out of the ordinary - hey good looker :)


A few Roman sites later, we hit the shops to buy excessive amounts of food for Christmas lunch - it should be a good meal.

Sarah says...
I couldn't take Brendon seriously today - he has his "standing around" pants on and he looked too overdressed for the occasion. We went to some Roman ruins in Avignon, which after Orange yesterday were not as good, but the town itself was lovely. After the Roman Aquaduct we picked up Bron. Later in the evening Cookie drank his body weight in alcohol and apparently likes to use the word prawn a lot when describing people.


Pilty says...
Today was ‘pay-out-pilty’ day. Well, I’d like to claim I was dressing up fancy because we were picking up Bron from the train station today, but the real reason was that after washing my clothes (including all my jeans) last night, they hadn’t dried and I was forced to wear my good dress trousers and black dress shoes. Supposedly I was looking very good today, but this came at the cost of not being able to walk freely while moving between sites (especially stairs)

We checked out another amphitheatre (or was it a theatre or an arena? I always get them mixed up) which used to be (maybe still is) a bullring. The fact it was used for bullfighting was the only remotely interesting thing about it. On the other hand, we did get to check out an aquaduct which is something I hadn’t seen yet.


Bronwen says...
I am very pleased that the Lufthansa air hosts got their full 12hrs of sleep as that only made the whole plane about 4hrs late into Lyon which meant that I then missed my connecting train which then meant that I didn't arrive into Avignon until 6:00pm instead of 2:00pm. I am not bitter at all. A night of food, wine and chatting soon made me forget my travelling woes. Brendon dressed for the great occasion of my arrival to the vacation - that was nice.

3 comments:

  1. Ok so I'm pretty disappointed right now. All this talk of Pilt's attire and no picture of it? I don't believe there was no photo taken. I'm putting in an official request for it.

    Cool aquaduct by the way. Looks just like it does in civilization.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I constantly notice Cookie reference to people being prawns.
    You guys were in Arles - that's where my parents lived for a while. It's the only place I've seen where they've cut out a part of a Roman aqueduct to make way for a roundabout. Mim

    ReplyDelete
  3. I believe there is photo evidence somewhere...

    ReplyDelete