We had a great trip to Grenoble, the French Alps, and Avignon last week. Unfortunately, I'm experiencing technical difficulties again and can't seem to get the photos uploaded to the blog. Instead, you can go to this website to look at them. I recommend you click on "Slideshow" to see them to the best advantage.
Pictures are way more fun, but briefly in words, here's what we did: took the TGV from Paris to Grenoble (It would have been a five hour drive but only took three hours on the train), then spent an afternoon and morning exploring the old part of the city on foot, taking the gondola up to the Bastille, and visiting their Museum of the French Resistance. The mountainous area around the city was a redoubt of the resistance fighters, and everywhere we went on this trip we saw memorials to these courageous men and women.
The next day we rented a car and drove north into the Chartreuse range (I guess these are Alps, or maybe "Pre-Alps"), stayed in a wonderful little hotel called L'Atre Fleuri (The Flowering Hearth). Our room had windows that opened above a mountain stream, which we listened to all night long -- heaven! That night we ate dinner at the hotel and tasted the famous regional Chartreuse liqueur, made by monks from a recipe that has been kept secret for a few hundred years.
We were curious about these monks, so the next day we went to Le Musée de la Grande-Chartreuse which tells all about their history and way of life. They are the world's strictest monastic order, living in near-complete seclusion not only from the world but also from each other. Each monk has his own "cell" (actually, a small two-story cottage & garden) in which he spends his entire life alone, working and praying. Three times a day he sees his fellow monks at church but doesn't speak to them. He eats alone, his meals delivered through a trap door in the thick wall. Once a week he is allowed a three-hour hike and conversation in the mountains with the members of his community. And that's pretty much it, day in and day out, for the past 900 years. A community of brothers does all the manual work, takes care of the monks' physical needs, and oh yes -- keeps the secret recipe and supervises the making of the liqueur at a nearby factory. The monastery is nestled in the mountains at some distance from the museum; you can hike up and get a faraway view of it (Steve did), but you can't visit. They do have an interesting website, though: click here
From the Chartreuse we headed south of Grenoble through the Vercors range, staying in an amazing town where all the houses were suspended on cliffs above the river (Pont en Royans). Our hotel was a wacky little place with no air conditioning or internet but the stupidest high-tech security system. You were supposed to register your thumbprint on arrival and then press your finger on a little glass pad above your doorknob to get into your room. It never worked. All up and down the hall you could see people thumbing these pads and listening to their doorknobs tell them: vous n'êtes pas autorisé, vous n'êtes pas autorisé ... (you are not authorized).
We made our way next day down to Avignon and visited Pont du Garde, an aqueduct bridge built by the Romans in the first century to deliver fresh water from the Alps all the way to Nimes, over 50 kilometers (31 miles) away, engineering it to slope only 24.8 cm (about 10 inches) over the entire distance. It was a blistering hot afternoon when we were there, and the river looked so inviting ... we didn't swim, but many people did, even jumping from the cliffs into the water, as you can see when you go to the photos.
The weather continued very hot that weekend, which made it hard for me to fully appreciate the amazing city of Avignon. The Palais du Pape (Pope's Palace) was wonderfully cool, however (we lingered for 3 hours, which Steve claims is all my fault), and if you ever do go we can recommend a wonderful place to stay, on an island in the Rhone only a 5 minute drive from the city. The whole thing is farmland, orchard, forest, and a few 18th- & 19th-century houses -- all protected from any further development because the island is subject to flooding. We stayed at a wonderful place called Les Domaines des Rhodes -- Ferme Jamet. We had a cottage to ourself, owls hooting in the night, and breakfast on the terrace under the shade of ancient trees. You would have thought you were 100 miles from the nearest city rather than two or three.
Here are a couple of Avignon photos I did manage to upload:
Sur le pont d'Avignon ...
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