This was the first day that I woke up feeling like a normal person. We drove to Avignon, which is a walled city that was once the home of the French popes-back in the 1300's and 1400's. We had breakfast and then took a two-hour tour of the Palais des Papes. Afterwards, we walked around the city, tried to go to a museum, but we hit the lunch hour and everything started closing. We went to a pastry shop for a goat cheese and spinach pastry and a smoked duck sandwich. Fantastic.
We drove up a bit along the Rhone River to Chateauneuf du Pape, which is famous for its wines (this is silly because the whole area is famous for its wines). We went into a "cave" (which is a wine tasting cellar) and bought some wine. We traveled on to Orange, but by then it was pouring down rain. We stopped for some coffee and a crepe and re-planned the rest of the day.
We decided to hit the open road and travel through Provence. After several wrong turns, we saw some spectacular little towns - we drove over cobblestone bridges that took us over moats into walled villages. The views were fantastic, and I'm afraid the pictures just don't do the area justice. I used to think that Santorini was the ideal honeymoon location: I'm now convinced that the ideal is a small town in Provence. Two of the highlights are St. Didier and Bonnieux, but there were several hotel/restaurants that were near small towns but self-contained retreats. Somewhere along this road we made an important turning point in our vacation: we stopped trying to pronounce the town names correctly and started pronouncing them phonetically.
Next we stopped into a little tourist trap that I fell in love with. It's an area where water comes out of the bottom of a cliff, and no one knows where the source of the water is. It's called Font de Vaucluse ("The Source") and there are nonstop consumer stands as you walk along the river up to the source. However, there was a little medieval town along the river with restaurants pretty much right on top of the water. It was a 10 on the quaint scale.
We drove some more and ended up in Pertuis for dinner. It was not a big town, but had a very nice Moroccan restaurant. After dinner, we drove back to the hotel and crashed.