On the Road to Avignon

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Just a simple trip to Avignon turned out to be an adventurous nightmare for Tracy, my traveling companion, and me as we began our Christmas vacation in the south of France. It seemed so simple on Google maps: get on N-88 and go southeast to A7 (the auto-route). Instead, I inadvertently went north on N-88 for 30 minutes only to turn around, return to Le Puy, and then go south on N-88. (The French do not indicate the cardinal directions on their road signs; they only give city names.) That extra hour would eventually put us in Avignon at 5:30, which is dark at this time of year and never a good time to try to find a place, especially one in a strange city that didn’t allow cars on the street to the front door of our AirBNB apartment!   

Halfway through the trip south we suddenly found ourselves traveling through the mountains where hairpin turns and 10% descents only multiplied the difficulty of traveling on a two-lane highway that seemed to take four times longer than if we had found the more direct A-7 autoroute.

“You better put the car in low-gear,” advised Tracy, who had once ridden with a man who lost his brakes in the mountains. Coming from the relatively flat state of Michigan, I just never think about mountains and gearshift changes. A couple times I had traveled in the Rockies in low gear, but couldn’t remember how to do it now—especially with a French car. We stopped on a roadside outlet and searched for the car manual. Of course, we couldn’t find anything about shifting to low gear. Then we just surmised that putting the gear on “M” would do the trick since  the car’s automatic gearshift displayed no other option. The problem was the “plus” and “minus” indicators. What did they mean? So I tried the “M” setting and played with the “plus” and “minus.” Lo and behold, the engine seemed to slow down the car on “plus 2,” and I used the brakes much less. The problem now was the sound of a belabored engine. I certainly didn’t want to have engine OR brake issues in these beautiful but sparsely-populated mountains.

Finally, we reached some fairly flat geography that would take us all the way into Avignon. We stopped at a snack bar/fruit market, where I took a much-needed bathroom  break—the standing up kind with a hole in the ground—and washed my hands in cold mountain water without soap. The “petit café” I drank sustained me throughout the rest of the day, which I would surely need once we came into the city to look for our AirBNB apartment. I spoke to the server behind the bar in French, and he seemed to understand me and I him. He said there were no more mountains ahead of us and that he had a nice Christmas holiday, but he quickly escaped this lively conversation to wait on another customer in the fruit market.

You might say we were driving blind on our way to Avignon. We had no detailed map, no GPS, and no street signs to help us find our destination. However, my experience in France has been to look for “Centre Ville” signs, which usually takes me where I want to go. Unfortunately, I confused the “Centre Ville” sign on the auto-route with the “Centre Commerciale” sign where big box stores lined up horrifically next to each other for a couple miles. The French have apparently adopted an urban plan of using the outskirts of their cities as a shopping magnet. I saw this same type of monstrosity in Clermont-Ferrand a month earlier.

the very festive Centre Ville

Once we navigated ourselves out of this commercial mess, by intuition no less, we moved on to the city of Avignon. Then, by the grace of God, we found a sign that finally pointed the way to the “Centre Ville” through the fortified walls of the old city where we would stay. As we entered the city on the day after Christmas, people were everywhere on the streets leisurely strolling and shopping. Security guards barricaded many roads to protect these pedestrians and that made it more difficult to find the road of our apartment. And we thought the month-long train strike would be a problem! Here we were within an inch of our destination, and we had to deal with barricades and one-way streets without a compass. However, our traveler’s luck took us to a woman security guard who took pity on us after we told her (in French) our predicament. She looked up our apartment's address on her GPS and then graciously let us through the barricade. It was at this point that I knew we were going to make it. Intuition and dumb luck were beginning to pay off.

We traveled down the street, but were confused about which way to turn at the intersection. Tracy hopped out of the car to ask someone in the corner pharmacy to guide us, but she couldn’t understand the woman’s French. The woman then exited the pharmacy and pointed out the direction we wanted to go. We followed the woman’s finger but ended up at another barricade. This security guard who had no pity for us told me to turn the car around and go back. We needed another clue to get us closer to our destination. 

Tracy got out of the car and asked a couple people on the street for directions. This trick frequently works because some local person will speak English. When when it didn’t work, we thought to call up Lydia, our AirBNB host, on my cell phone. She responded immediately and like an air traffic controller guiding a jet plane to the right glide path, she talked us toward the apartment. We first had to get to the main road, she said, which turned out to be crowded by cars, traffic lights, and numerous buses that had just pulled out of their depot stop.

"Left and then left again," she said. This maneuver took several minutes, so we let Lydia go since she was in the middle of preparing a dinner for 20 people. Fortunately, we found the streets she had indicated until we came up to a narrow, lifeless street where the underground parking area was supposed to be. Thanks to another man who happened to be walking on the street, we learned we were on the right road; parking was just a little further down the street and around the corner. But panic soon set in again after we entered the structure and wound downward on a spiral ramp that had numerous scrapes on its walls from cars that had previously barely passed through. The parking spaces were numbered. Were these spaces reserved parking or open parking? Another “angel” in the structure assured us the parking was open to anyone. You just can’t afford to make such mistakes in France. They are quick to fine you no questions asked.

We parked the car, took out our suitcases, and rode one floor up on the elevator. As we tried to find the exit, a large group of people came upon us. We asked them for directions to the “sortie.” Not only did they guide us up the next stairway, but one of the men carried my suitcase! The Christmas spirit was alive and well in Avignon on this night.

We called Lydia again to guide us to the apartment where the street was supposed to be right around the corner from the parking structure. “Look for the church,” she said, “and turn right at the first street.” We walked toward what we thought was a church and not only found the train station, but one of the walled city’s towers. We called her back. “Turn the other way,” she said, and voilà, we found the right street: another lonely, dark, and narrow pathway that only allowed pedestrians and featured a landmark, the "Love Shop." We held our breaths and pressed on looking for #18 with a grill for a door. 

After walking up and down the street, we found it. I looked up Lydia’s recently texted instructions. We had to put our hand through the grill and punch out the code to the front door of the apartment building. Once in, we needed another code to open a little box where she kept the apartment key. Ah ha! We got the key and entered the building. Then we climbed two flights of a narrow, spiral staircase and found our beautiful and cozy AirBNB apartment. Quick, who’s first to the bathroom?!?