Kiwi Roaming

The Pope’s fled to Avignon in the 1300’s building themselves a palace within the partially walled city, then Pope Innocent VI completed a fortified wall to protect his wealth from some French King who decided the church was too rich – or something like that. The result is a city in two parts, within the wall which is medieval and quaint, then outside which is modern and functional.

The streets are narrow (one car wide) with no parking inside the wall as such. Their buses are small and tiny (I only got a pic of a small one) which makes loads of sense. Our side of the walled city is more rundown (not sure thats the right word, not as flash) than the other side which has shopping streets with high end brands and very fancy looking restaurants.

As we are in France we had fresh croissants and scrambled eggs for breakfast before heading to the highest part of the wall to look at the view which was awesome. There are loads of fortifications and castles, villages and vineyards off in the distance making it an interesting time. Sadly half of the park grounds were closed so we then headed to walk across the Pont D’Avignon – the half bridge that was built in 1177 as a whole bridge and destroyed by a King in 1226, rebuilt by the city again but then in the 1600’s fell into disrepair and unable to cope with the currents of the Rhône it started falling apart. Now the incomplete bridge is a tourist attraction.

We continued to wandering until we found the local food market – which was starting to close up sadly – and marveled at the array of interesting foods. Steve and I were impressed by the spices and salts stalls, so many aromours and flavours we’d never seen before. It was about 2pm when we left there, hot (29C) and tired and hungry so we selected a fab looking place on the square and indulged in far too much food along with 2 rounds of drinks – we probably didn’t need these. The rest of our day involved relaxing in the lovely courtyard at our apartment followed by an evening explore and a bits and bobs dinner.

On our evening walk Steve and I found a fabulous playground in a church grounds absolutely full of kids running around and playing football. We were amused by the way they used the 6000+ year old walls to kick balls against. My big kid tested his skills on the balance boards too (below).

We didn’t go outside the wall other than to walk up the steps for the view as there was just so much to explore in the walled city. We also didn’t get to the Palace of the Popes which seemed to be popular with the coach loads of tourists.

Above left is our wee street.