Day 6: Avignon to Pisa
/Our place in Avignon was the nicest, by far, on our entire trip so far. We were in it for well under 12 hours. It's comical, really. After the issues with our previous places, walking into the house was so refreshing.
Since we arrived so late into Avignon, I requested that we stay a bit through the morning. I've, for as long as I can remember, wanted to go to France. It was a bit painful for me to think of crashing for just the night and then driving to Italy without walking through a French village. So we stuck around (a bit longer than we meant to) and walked the sweltering and bustling streets of Avignon. We were there during Bastille, so it.was.packed! We found a crowded parking lot that had a free bus into the town center and sat waiting for the bus for a bit. While we waited we got to talk with the sweetest old French lady that ever did live. She and her grandson were waiting for the bus and her English speaking was beautiful. We rode the bus in and enjoyed people watching. We walked around the town center for a bit and then found a place to eat lunch.
We ate lunch at a restaurant in the village by just pointing to something random on the menu and hoping for the best. I'd asked about foods safe for Celiacs and our waitress spoke Spanish and Josh speaks enough Spanish that she was able to understand to bring out an allergy menu. The menu had numbers that indicated what dishes were ok, so I pointed to one and wondered for the next 45 minutes what it was. Our waitress apologized several times that our lunch was taking so long and no one was quite sure why it did. Luke and I walked around, as he was very tired, fussy and hungry, and then Joel and I walked over to a market across the town square from where we were sitting to pick out some bread, cheese and fruit for dinner on the road that night. The market was beautiful! Like a for REAL whole foods, not the overpriced fancy market in the States (that I will admit I love). There were counters for everything imaginable from produce, so salted, dried meats, to house plants and flowers. It smelled amazing. I could have spent an hour just walking around looking at all the beautifully simple displays of local, every day food.
After eating lunch as quickly as we could , and it was delicious, we sped walked to the bus stop and hurried back into the van. We didn't get out of town and on the road for our 6 1/2 hour drive until 2:30. MUCH later than we'd hoped.
The drive was incredible. The Apennine mountains are truly a site to behold. They reach so high and are so jagged. The road system that runs through them between Avignon and Pisa is mind boggling. It's a series of towering bridges and extremely long tunnels. There was a 3 or 4 hours stretch there where we were either on a bridge or going through a tunnel. That was all. On the bridges we could look right and see the Mediterranean and to the left gorgeous, sprawling Italian villages crawling up the mountain sides. My pictures of it are simply aweful, as there was literally NO where to pull over and the Italian drivers are a bit crazy, so even if there were a tiny side space to pull over, one would be putting their life at the mercy of aggressive drivers. So, it was roll down the window and do the best you can type of picture taking. But I would encourage you to google image Apennine mountains, and you can see what I mean by a site to behold. They.are.stunning!
We drove late into the evening, once again, because of getting out later than planned. We arrived at Camp Darby in Pisa, Italy around 10, got the boys to bed as soon as possible and collapsed into bed.
