Friday - Collouire and a little Provence

Friday, November 13th – Collouire
From Tom: A long drive from Neims last night. We have a very spiffy Czech car, a Skoda, good sized and powerful. The roads here are excellent (unlike the U. S.). We have worked out the perfect travel arrangement. Barb is the world’s best navigator, I never drive over 100MPH at night, and Toni reads or sleeps in the back seat – perfect!!
From Barbara:
We’ve had several interesting days. Today we are sort of resting here in Collouire. This was John & my favorite town in the south of France. It is close to the Spain border, right on the water, and this time of year very, very quiet. In the summer it is packed with tourists and quite a mob scene. Now many hotels and restaurants are closed but enough remain open to be convenient and nice for us. Today is cloudy which is too bad but it is still beautiful.
We arrived last evening and had a little trouble finding our hotel because it is tucked away in a small alley. However, once you find it, it is wonderful. There is a lovely garden and swimming pool – though much to cold to swim in it. Tom & Toni’s room is a suite and an outside deck. I will post some pictures.
Comment from Tom: I have been to some beautiful places – the bouchard gardens in Canada, swimming into underground caves in Positano, Sunsets in the sarenghetti (sp), etc, but I have never been in a more impressive setting than this hotel in Collouire. Our apartment is spacious and full of old world charm. We had lunch today on our very large balcony overlooking the most gloriously autumn garden. I will hate to leave.
Barbara:
We’ve spent the morning walking around the small town. It has lots of little alleys and stone walkways around the water. There are at least 4 separate beaches with clear aqua colored water. The castle is closed today due to some sort of event but will be open tomorrow so we will visit it before we leave. Most of the people here seem to be local and they are enjoying lunch while they close all the local businesses from 12 – 2. This afternoon we are going to a small museum.
Many well known painters have spent extensive time here – loving the views and colors – Matisse, Picasso, Durain, to name a few. The houses are all pastel colors – soft orange, yellow, blue, green, pink. Makes a very pretty town.
As I said the last few days have been pretty busy – I will try to recap them and will also post pictures in my next post.
We left Cassis on Wednesday morning, November 11. It is a holiday here in France as it is in the USA so a lot of things were closed. I thought it would be nice to drive north to some place a bit more Provencal to give Tom & Toni a taste of that area vs. on the water. I remembered a darling town called something like Eguileres. I found what I thought was it on the map and we drove there. When we got there I thought my memory was faulty since it didn’t look very memorable at all. We parked and walked around a little and saw a parade of local folks commemorating the veterans/and “fallen”. First they carried floral wreaths, then local soldiers, firefighters, school children, and everybody else. It was actually quite touching.
On re-examining the map we found two more towns with almost the very same name. They weren’t terribly far but it did take some time to drive to them. Again I was quite disappointed with the second one It didn’t look like anything special. The third one was the one I remembered. It was very quaint and small. The reason I even remembered it all was that a restaurant guy in San Francisco named George who was French had told me his dream was to return to this town and open a restaurant. For awhile he had a restaurant in San Francisco named “George’s”. It was very small, located directly under a freeway, but had good, basic French food. Eventually it closed but I’ve seen him a number of times since – being the Maitre D at a number of different places in SF.

Anyway, the third “E” town was great and we walked around the streets and alleys and admired its quaintness. We stopped and had lunch at a restaurant with mainly locals having huge meals and/or drinking pastis (the Provencal licorice flavored liquor) – mostly farmers.
After lunch we started our drive towards the Camargue where our hotel was for the night. On the way we saw a sign for a “Roman Aquaduct” so we drove there and I took a few pictures of it. By now Tom was anxious to see some Roman ruins.
We finished our drive to the place in the Camargue – Aigues Mortes. It took quite a while and we arrived at dusk. I had made reservations at a hotel outside the walled city as I couldn’t find much in guidebooks or on the web. I had been disappointed that I couldn’t find anything inside the city since it is a perfectly preserved medieval walled city that people still live in. John and I had been there a couple of times. We found the hotel where I’d made the reservation “the Canal Hotel.” The door was locked – the owner came to the door and said I couldn’t have possibly made a reservation there (not true – oh well). So we went into the walled city of Aigues Mortes and went to the Tourist Office. Although I was irritated that they had ignored my reservation in a sense I was glad because I really wanted to stay within the walled city.
The woman at the tourist office gave us a couple of hotel suggestions, we picked the least expensive, she made a phone call and told us that it was available but that the owner wouldn’t be there for 15 minutes as he had to come in from home. (Remember this was a French holiday) We met him at the hotel in 15 minutes. The place was very small and was more of a restaurant than a hotel. However, the restaurant was closed due to the holiday. The owner was very nice and accommodating. He showed us the rooms which were small but quite nice (and unbelievably inexpensive). He gave us the code for getting into the place after he was gone (he was leaving immediately) and we were set for the night.
I’ve never had a hotel to myself before. It was kind of neat. We opened our doors to the hallway, had wine (cocktail hour) before venturing out into the “city” for dinner. We found a little simple restaurant. Toni got mussels (they were excellent) and Tom and I got “steak” (I suspect it Was bull.) Steak was tough but good. After dinner we returned to the deserted hotel and imagined ghosts visiting us during the night. In the morning we walked around the walls of the city. You can actually walk the entire ramparts but now you now have to pay to do this and the ticket office wasn’t open yet.
A little about Aigues Mortes. It was built by one of the King Louis of France. At the time the other ports in the South of France weren’t in France. They were in Saxony or some other non-France place (e.g. Marseilles). Aigues Mortes was on the water and a perfect port (or so Louis thought). He built this fortified medieval city on the banks of the Mediterraneun and a branch of the Rhone river. Unfortunately before very long the Mediterraneun receding leaving Aigues Mortes high and dry. The city continued to exist but not as a great port. I believe one of its greatest successes had been manufacturing sea salt. You can’t even see the Mediterraneun from there now – it is miles away. The river is still there and there are a lot of barges on it – see later pictures.

We left Aigues Mortes and headed north to Nimes. Tom wanted to see Roman ruins and Nimes has some of the best in France. Nimes was a Roman settlement dating back to before Christ. We visited the coliseum, a museum that had a 3D movie of the Gladiators, and then a park with a ruined “Temple to Diana.” All was great. The coliseum is the most well preserved one in the world (or so they say on the audioguide). The movie was great but we sat too close and couldn’t read all the subtitles. The general jist of the movie was explaining the original gladiators in the Nimes arenas – they went to Gladiator schools, came in and fought each other, in pairs, with sharp weapons. When one of the fighters was ready to give up he went down on one knee and appealed to the ruler in the audience. Most of the time the ruler decided that the loser had put up a good fight and could go on to fight another day – rarely he was sentenced to death on the spot. Other entertainment at the arena included wild animals attacking prisoners who had been sentenced to death and who were tied up making them simply animal food. Apparently this part of the entertainment wasn’t popular with the crowd and they went to the vendor fast food places and ate sausages.
The garden at Nimes contains the spring that has always fed the city with water. There is now a very nice park there and the ruined “Temple to Diana” which I will post in the pictures.
We left Nimes around 4:00 pm and had a pretty long drive to Collouire although most of it was freeway. Our roles have become: Tom drives, I navigate using the pretty detailed maps I brought with me, and Toni kibitzes from the back seat. Tom is definitely having a love hate relationship with the car. On the freeway he extols its ability to “hug the road”, accelerate, uses very little gas, pass every other car/truck in sight, and then on city streets when the engine dies unexpectedly because he hasn’t given it sufficient gas at low speeds, he yells “this goddamn car”.
We did have an interesting car experience on our way into Nimes. I mentioned quite a few days ago that the headlights weren’t aligned and that this was very dangerous on our drive to Cassis. We had decided that we should get the lights aligned should we find a mechanic that seemed available to fix them. We were driving into Nimes when we passed a kind of “auto row” including a Skoda dealer. We pulled into the service area and asked the manager if he spoke English. Of course not. We were able to act out, using sign language, that the left headlight pointed to the ground. He got in the car and showed us the knob that adjusts the headlights inside the car. This Skoda is a hell of a car.
6 pm
We’ve had a very quiet day here in Collouire but it’s been nice. Walked around the town a few times which takes about 5 minutes. We had a nice picnic lunch on Tom & Toni’s patio – bread, cheese, olive paste, prosciutto, and wine. What could be better? It could have been better had it been sunny but you can’t have everything I guess. Tomorrow we head to Spain – Cadaques.
10 pm
Tonight we went out to dinner to a little restaurant recommended by our hotel. We had tried to go there last night but arrived too late to get squeezed in. Tonight the dinner was wonderful. Surprise of surprises, we order local anchovies and we all (even Toni) loved them. Colloiure is apparently very famous for its anchovies and it is big business here. There are many wholesale dealers who make big deals around the world. The anchovies we had last night were fresh and marinated. They were unbelievably yummie.