Provence

As always, I fell asleep in the car as we drove south into Provence—the backseats of cars have an unfailingly soporific effect on me—so when I woke up, the heat had intensified and the cicadas were chirping en masse. The towns that flashed by were uniformly built from some pale stone which showed to great advantage against the verdant vineyards. Most of the roads were lined by shady trees, making for very inviting curves. It was at this point that I remembered that this was the first day of sorority recruitment…

We stayed four nights in Uzès, a Provençal town rather arbitrarily chosen by my father because of its proximity to a very famous Roman aqueduct (Pont du Gard) and which is quite proud of being the first duchy of France. It was tiny—a kernel of a historical center encircling a menacing fortress, the modern town spreading to the southwest, and vineyards within a five minute walk of our hotel. Our hotel room (third floor European/fourth floor American and naturally sans lift, which wore Swen out but gave us a nice view of the roofs of Uzès) was located just across the street from the pedestrian district and just down the street from its associated restaurant, where we ate a FEAST our first night. It was a very fine dinner. I made everyone do their own ordering in French; the waiter was quite proud of them.

In preparation for Pont du Gard, we tried to find the small aqueduct right next to Uzès. We had a proper McMag picnic on the lawn down by the river, watched the locals frolic about in the trees, and then realized we could not discover the location of the aqueduct at all. The map, quite frankly, lied to us…That, or the tiny 10-foot-long ditch along the path was the aqueduct. We walked for quite a long ways, just in case the aqueduct popped out at us, but it was only when we were climbing back up the hill to Uzès that we spotted aqueduct-like shapes on the opposite slope. I’m still not even convinced that that was the real thing, but we accepted it as a moral victory and went off to find crêpes.

Due to various illnesses, our second day in Uzès was decidedly low-key, but Mum, Maddie, and I toured the castle. We took the French tour, so I had to translate, and allow me to say that it is really, really hard to listen, understand, translate, and speak at the same time. Essentially, I just gave them little summaries at the end of each room on the tour because I could only remember half the tidbits our guide had recited. We climbed the tower at the end; the steps at the top were almost half the size of my not-very-large foot! I can’t imagine trying to hurry down them to protect the fortress from invaders…

Finally, on our third day, we made the pilgrimage to the renowned Pont du Gard—highest Roman aqueduct bridge ever built. I have helpfully compiled these statistics for you from Wikipedia: 160 feet high, 899 feet long, 30 feet wide at the bottom and 9.8 feet wide at the top, formerly carried 44 million gallons of water a day to Nîmes (the ancient Romans used four times the daily amount of water as an average European today, apparently), and constructed from an estimated 50,400 tons of stone which are held together by friction alone. We spent the morning in the museum at the visitor`s center learning these sorts of important facts and marveling at the ingenuity of the ancient Romans. In the afternoon, we walked across the bridge itself (it is massive), poked around its foundations and its edges, and had another lovely picnic on the rocks lining the Gard River. I saw a few copies of paintings of the Pont du Gard from the 1800s [and the real things in the Louvre a few weekends ago!] in the visitors’ center and was amazed by how little the view had changed.

We drove to Avignon in the evening for dinner and a reconnaissance mission, as my TGV would be leaving from there early the next morning. I saw the bridge which just halfway out into the Rhône, and it was as if my childhood was coming to life…I was quite sad to have to say goodbye to my family again; my four weeks with Maddie and my one week with my parents went by far too quickly. But on the 21^st of August, it was time to pick up the suitcase I had stashed with Dr. Peters in Geneva and move on to Hannover…

Photos.