Avignon and Trail’s End

That afternoon we took a long train from Barcelona to Avignon, France. From the train station to the apartment, we had a funny taxi driver who spoke some Spanish. “You know,” he told us, “Avignon is home to the pope’s home.” (A French pope moved here in 1309 when Rome was not safe). “But,” he shrugged, “the pope is not here.”

Our apartment was up an impossibly narrow, steep spiral staircase. It was right above Il Trevi pizzeria, and we had just suffered through a long train ride with stile jumpers in first class listening to their phones loudly, yelling to each other, and getting off at every stop to have a cigarette before jumping back on. So we ordered a pizza from Il Trevi.

The next morning, we went to the town’s food market, Les Halles. Every town in France has a Les Halles. We bought soup from a nice woman who helped us with our French . We bought a bottle of Cotes du Rhones from a man who had grown the grapes and made the wine himself. He and other local vintners had banded together and bought a stall in Les Halles from which to sell their boutique bottles.

Then we wandered around the town , which impressed at every turn . We went to the Papal Palace and climbed the hill behind it to see out over the Rhone and the city . We ended our day by having a drink on St. Didier plaza .

By the time we got back to our room, French President Macron was on TV announcing the closure of all nonessential businesses and the need to stay at home. So Sunday, we still thought we would ride out the COVID closures in Avignon and try to hook back up with our itinerary later this spring.

Monday, we walked around, and the town was seriously silent. We walked over to the Ile de Barthelasse. Avignon lies on a part of the Rhone that has two separate tongues, and the bulb of land in the middle is Ile de Barthelasse. Many people who passed us wished us good day, and I told Mary it felt a little like after 9/11: everyone being friendly and sympathetic. We found a boulangerie that was open and ordered a coffee, though it came from a small appliance. It was not a true espresso machine. We drank them sitting on chairs near a theater at a café that had closed but not put away their chairs.

That night, the EU commissioner said that they would be closing all borders. We changed our tickets so that we would fly out Thursday morning. This gave us two days to get to Paris 400 miles north in case there was trouble getting there.

When we went out the day we left, Tuesday, we had assumed that we would walk onto a train with our Eurail passes and see what happened. I went online to the national train site (SNCF) and tried to buy tickets, but most trains were cancelled and the few left were full. Luckily, we had noticed on a previous trip to the Avignon Center train station to see about getting tickets with our passes that, though the ticket office was closed, the machines giving out tickets were not. So we went to see whether we could buy tickets on them. And we could. We bought two tickets to Paris and hired a cab outside to rush us back to the apartment, wait, and return us to the station, where minutes dripped by like boulders.

We ended up at Gare de Lyon in Paris. I had seen on Google Maps (with which I have relationship like that with an abusive boyfriend—I keep going back though it betrays me again and again) that the RER train runs out from there to Charles de Gaulle airport. Well, AFTER we had bought tickets for the RER, we learned that there is more than one RER train. Two guys who had been on our train helped us in Gare de Lyon to figure out which RER line to take. And a nice employee of the Metro told us which RER we needed. I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. We got on the wrong direction, then switched and got on one that was not going to the right terminus. So we transferred at Stade de France, an icon of the sports world where the sometimes-world-champion French soccer team plays, which I noted to Mary probably looked to most French kids like Wrigley Field.

We had reservations in a hotel in a small town that actually contains some part of Charles DeGaulle Airport (CDG) outside of Paris: Mauregard, which means roughly “evil look.” We tried to hail a cab outside CDG but were shunted to some non-legitimate driver. He waits for the bags to be in the trunk and then says 25 euro. It’s a 3 km ride. No, no, he insists it’s much further. No it’s a 3 km ride, it turns out. He takes us to a shabby “spa” hotel. No we say and tell him again the address and name of our hotel, which is lovely. The former carriage house and barn of a chateau that still stands next door. It’s a lovely little picturesque preserved town.

We started to walk through town the next day, only to read an electronic sign flashing in French, “City square is closed.” Or showing a dog with the caption, “I am in my home. Are you?” So we went back and sat out in the garden, where a gray-haired gentleman in green sweater got out a slim 6-inch wide electric mower and proceed to mow the grass while we sat out back finishing the bottle of Cuban rum we had hoped would last all trip (along with coffee and San Pellegrino water).

The next morning, we had to sign a form for the French police explaining why we were out in public, though it was just a 2 km drive from the hotel to the terminal. We got on our plane on time, and there were only about 10 people in our whole section, maybe 40 on the whole flight. We got liberal amounts of food and drink because it might have otherwise been wasted; the flight attendant told us it was the last flight let out of Paris for our carrier, American Airlines.

When we got into Miami, we had to fill in forms about whether we had any symptoms. The health people who met us gave us more info, and asked us if we had any symptoms (no one took our temperature). When I asked whether we should isolate for two weeks, the woman (a health representative) said “No, if you don’t have any symptoms, you can just go about your life.” ?????? This was not correct as far I knew then and as I have been told MANY times since. In the airport, bars and restaurants were not only open, but packed with people! It was like I had been on two different planets in one day. One in which COVID was here and taken seriously, and one in which it was deemed some fantastical event happening on a different planet. We headed to an extended stay hotel and began our self-isolation.

Some people knit. Some people cook. Mary and I make elegant itineraries based on the least expenditure and trouble, and the most payoff of what we think we want to see. To have to give that up is like making a dinner and no one shows up or writing a book that gets burned up in a fire. We had no way of foreseeing the COVID pandemic, and we made the right choice to get back before the uncertain situation turned to certain deprivation. But we’re certainly sad not to have been able to live out the itinerary as planned. Maybe we can use this itinerary as a guide for a future trip. We certainly hope to travel again as soon as possible. Look for this blog to start up again then. And thanks for following our recent adventures.