Nimes to Aix-en-Provence

Bonjour! Today we are making our way to another well known town on the French Riviera Aix-en-Provence. First we had one more Roman icon to visit in Nimes from our pass we brought yesterday. We packed up and cleaned the house as much as we could before running the bags up and down the stairs to the car. Since we had everything in the car we decided to just put it into underground paid parking again where we knew it and all our stuff would be all still there when we returned. We chose one a bit closer to the Magne Tower which we were visiting and walked through the park to get there. Now this tower is the tallest of the 80 that were part of the 7km wall surrounding the town of Nimes. It was built in 16AD and the exact role of the tower is not known, perhaps a watch tower or just a demonstration of Roman power... basically which towns ruler has the biggest ? Tower.

It is part of the only three remains of the wall that exist which includes two entrance archways - The Porte de France and the Porte d'Auguste. The tower itself provided a beautiful view over the city but certainly didn't feel earthquake safe! On the way back to the car we were talking about how numb to travelling we have become and we don't wake up everyday excited like we should do. We though maybe it's because we havn't ever done such a large road trip or maybe we are just home sick? So whilst it appears we are happy and enjoying things the hardest part is actually day after day working out what you are going to do. We also thought perhaps we should have got some friends to come with us since we enjoyed spending some time with Krystie and TJ in Bali. We also thought that it might have been easier to base ourselves in one or maybe two different cities in the Riviera and just done day trips around to prevent all the packing up and moving. Maybe next time, since it is hard organising this stuff from little old NZ. Perhaps these blogs may even help some of you plan your own trip :).

Before getting in the car we located the nearest post office so we could send some post cards back home to our Grandmas. We have thought about when our parents did their OEs and it must have been so hard for both them and their parents keeping in contact with snail mail. I am lucky that my Nannies is keeping up with the blogs religiously but Lews Grandma June doesnt have a computer so its not possible. Lew drew her a wee map of where we had been so hopefully she will feel a bit more in the loop!

One thing we had noticed about Nimes is that everywhere from the bollards to the small brass plates in the ground there is the symbol of a crocodile chained to a palm tree. Since Nimes nor France in general dont exactly have any crocodiles as part of their local food chain we tried to do a bit more research as to how this symbol had become the towns coat of arms. The significance of this is that it was brought to the town by the early Roman settlers which meant it was older than the Roman temple - Masion Carree and the ancient arena - Les Arena. It seems that it infact symbolises the colonisation of Egypt by the Romans some very long ago time and I cannot find the exact date of when this was! - Comment below if you know!

Leaving Nimes behind in our small nameless Citroen - I havnt decided whether its boy or a girl yet? If you know me well you will know that I often name my cars and define which gender it is also. But Lew seems to think that it is a boy at the front since it looks mean and a girl at the back. I guess we have a Hermaphrodite car! Let me know if you can think of any names that would suit him/her/it. Anyways back to it, I drove us to Arles and at this point we have driven so far that we have gone from the top of Cape Reinga in the North Island all the way to Bluff right at the tip of the South Island of New Zealand. That is a total of 2221kms of driving so far over the past two weeks since we picked up the car. Thats only 14 days out of the 50 days total we have the car and I think we should measure this journey by how many times we can drive up and down NZ. Stay tuned!

Arriving in Arles we just drove straight into the nearest parking structure since we still had all out stuff in the car, mainly only the grocery bags were in the back seat and could be seen. We had heard that people loved this town and it was the highlight of their French Riviera trip due to the endless coloured building that inspired many of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings. I have to admit we did see the potential beauty of the place but once again many of the shops were shut and there was a lack of flowers and open coloured shutter due to the time of year. I mean if you see any photos of us with locals in the back ground we are often in shorts and T-shirts and they are all bundled up in long pants, jackets and scarfs. Its still 20-27 degrees people! Not even London had their winter clothes in shops before we left and thats all we are finding in France. despite the weather being more favourable towards summer. We did however managed to find a small locally owned shop that was selling the Faguo belts which Lew had seen in Montpellier but didn't buy since he decided the one colour he liked was more my brother Masons taste than his own. This time there was a grey speckled version which he liked and he made another French souvenir purchase. We walked around the shops and to be honest as beautiful as these towns are they are starting to look much the same. I could imagine if you had just arrived in from NZ they would just blow your socks off but we are becoming a little blase at what we get to see on a day to day basis. In fact the thing in this town that was the most eye catching was when we were walking up the pathway along the Rhone River we came across the effort to refloat a boat that had partially sunk. We had clearly arrived mid way through since they already had the boat floating with large inflatable devices and were pumping the water out to lift it higher in the water. Lew was fascinated and had to stay to watch so I wandered off to find a free toilet by myself. I returned and they were using a barge to now pull the 1/4 underwater boat to what we guessed was some nearby drydocks. I couldn't find a name visible on the side of the boat to work out what had happened to it in the first place.

We were due in Aix-en-Provence at 5pm and it would take is 45 minutes via the toll road or 1 hour 20 minutes avoiding tolls and since it was already 4pm we didn't have much of an option if we were to meet out Airbnb host on time. This place thankfully had a carpark which reduced our stress levels a lot and hopefully means we wont go grey before we turn 30. We were shown around by Fabienne our host who spoke basically no English either and once again we got the full tour of the house in French only managing to pick up bits and bobs of what she was saying. A tad awkward but not the end of the world. Once we had dragged all our bags into yet another place we thought we better head out and find something for dinner. We were only 15 minutes walk from the town center and I can honestly say that this is one of the most stunning of all the town in this area we have visited. I would say if you are coming to the French Riviera I would recommend going to Montpellier, Nimes - to see the Arena, Avignon - to see the fortified wall around the outside of it which is rather uncommon that it is still intact with these cities, Arles since it is cute sitting on the side of the Rhone and Aix-en-Provence. You could also add in Uzes but I would recommend not going on a Sunday or Monday and head there on a Wednesday when the market is on. We are yet to get further up to Nice so we will let you know what we think! Not one of these places has everything you will want to see as a tourist in one place which is why you need to drive around and see them all. Aix-en-Provence had such as relaxed feel about it and is incredibly photogenic with the sunlight hitting the multicoloured brick buildings. It wasn't hard to find lovely lanes with lots of tasteful clothing and shoe stores where in the other cities (except Montpellier) it was hard to find things that were open. Instead of shopping for dinner we actually found a couple of cool mens clothing stores - Le Coq Sportif and Hero Seven. Lew has been looking for some obviously French clothing to add to his souvenir collection and he found some of these in Le Coq Sportif. The other shop Hero Seven is originally from Marseilles and is only in this France at the moment in which Lew found some chino's which he now tells me I forced him into buying but I know he secretly loves them since it is hard to find skinny, long and stretchy chinos within a certain price range. He had forgotten his wallet anyways so this was all going onto my credit card! We finally dragged ourselves away from the shops after being recommended a couple of places to go to by the guy in the shop and started to think about what we needed for dinner. I specifically wanted fish but it was much easier to find a butcher and buy some sausages. The annoying thing is that most of these shops have a minimum spend in which you can pay with a card and in this case we got a bit caught out. We didn't have any cash left to buy just the sausages so we had to rack up and extra €6 ($10 NZD) of meat just to make the cut and use my card. This involved buying some chicken for tomorrow nights dinner (It isn't cheap here, maybe its free range?! €14 ($23 NZD) per kg and also some salami which Lew tells me I embarrassingly asked for pepperoni which is Italian and not French. We got the local Rosetta which is their type of salami instead and this all added up to well above the €10 ($16.70 NZD) minimum spend. Having sorted dinner for the next two nights we picked up a fresh lettuce and walked home. I made dinner whilst Lew proof read my blogs for me. I also managed to wip up some chocolate self saucing pudding which was out wee treat for the night and it even tasted better than it does at home. We did some research about what to do tomorrow finally being a little exicited about what we have in stall. The morning will be spent looking around the markets of Aix-en-Provence of which there are 5 different ones and in the afternoon we will drive to the beach town of Cassis and walk into the Les Calanques. Au revoir bonne nuit everyone! xo