After a long illness, my grandmother Omi died last week. She was 94.

Born in East Prussia in 1917, she managed to survive World War II with her family intact. This included a harrowing escape from Konigsberg in early 1945 with her three young daughters in tow, just barely ahead of the advancing Red Army.

Eventually settling in the quiet town of Annweiler in the Rheinland-Pfalz, she and her husband Walter (my grandfather) rebuilt their lives and raised the three children. My grandfather was a businessman who owned and operated a metal fabrication plant in town — water tanks, cookware, etc. By the early 1960s the three daughters had grown up and started their lives. The eldest (Gisela) married a local lawyer and settled in the nearby city of Mainz; the other two daughters (twins) moved on to new homes farther afield, my aunt (Renate) settling in Munich and my mother emigrating to the USA.

My mom met my dad and they started a family. I was part of the first wave of children to hit the three German sisters, and more children soon followed. In the picture to the right you see me in her arms (I’m about 3 months old) and that’s my cousin Stefan, 3 years old and impossibly cute. Every year or two we would pull up and travel over to Germany for some big family get-together, or would host a visit from some of them coming over to the US. Germans get a lot of vacation time from work and so they’re always traveling somewhere!

In 1980, we started a small “exchange program” within our extended family, where an American kid would head over to Germany for a year to live and go to school with the cousins, and conversely a German kid would come to the US for a year. We toggled back and forth like this for something like 15 years. For the 1980-1981 school year, I got to be the first one to do it, and so at the age of 14 I headed to Annweiler to live with Omi (a German term for grandmother similar to “Granny”). She was raising my cousin Stefan, a couple years older than me, so I attended his high school on the top of the hill on the edge of Annweiler.

So I spent the year in Annweiler with Omi and Stefan, exploring the town and utterly immersed in German culture. I knew a tiny bit of German before I arrived, but once there I absorbed the language rapidly — it is truly amazing how quickly a child brain can absorb language. I was essentially fluent within months. Well, verbally fluent, where I could slur my way through the conjugations. Masculine, feminine, neuter …

Grandfather Walter (“Opa”) had passed several years prior, so it was the three of us in the house (Omi, Stefan and me). Already 60+ years old by then, Omi was a dynamo, running the household and keep us two boys in line. Well, mostly me, I think Stefan could do no wrong. She had some incredible gardens all around the house and a big cherry tree in the back that you could climb and gorge on (Julienne and Teresa have a great story about those cherries). At night after dinner we’d entertain ourselves with a board game or just TV, and I remember a few thrilling evening outings with Stefan — thrilling because he was a good 2-3 years older and so all his friends and activities were sooooo exciting for this awkward, dorky teen.

To the left is a picture of Omi with Julienne, my little sister, circa 1978.

After my year was up I returned to the US to start regular high school (having spent my freshman year overseas). Entering as a sophomore was a little jarring, and ended up somewhat disrupting my curriculum (and grades). So we all learned from that experience, and while my two younger sisters also eventually went to Germany for a year, they waited until finishing US high school and basically spent a “gap year” in Germany, a 13th year of high school. Further, by then Stefan had completed his studies at the Annweiler school, and had moved on to college, so while my two sisters followed my example in going to Germany for a year, they did so in Mainz with my aunt’s family and our cousins there.

So I was really the only one (of the US kids) to live with Omi and live in Annweiler. She ran a tight ship (and didn’t necessarily suffer uppity teenagers well) but also created a warm and loving household for us to grow up in. And when it was time for family reunions, they were held in Annweiler.

Eventually she sold the Annweiler house (after some 50 years of residence) and moved to Mainz to be close to the family there. As she aged she moved into assisted living but always with the extended family extremely close by and visiting frequently, if not daily!

We had a big family reunion in Mainz in 2008 and I got to see her one last time then (and Sharon got to meet her). I also had a chance to get out to Annweiler and see the old house (now owned by someone else) and meet up with old family friends there.

In June the family will gather in Annweiler and we’ll lay Omi to rest next to her husband. I’ll be proud to be there, representing the Monika / US branch of the family.

Rest in peace, Omi.

Exactly one year ago today, on December 22nd, 2010, I took delivery on my Chevrolet Volt. I was lucky enough (although you make your own luck) to get one of the first in the country — mine was in the very first batch that was released from the Detroit factory.

So here we are, a year later. What a year! From minor appearances on TV and in newspaper articles, to taking friends out to lunch demoing the car, to enjoying the thrill of driving the car itself, the year has been incredible! I have been looking forward to driving a real, solid, high-performance electric car for most of my adult life and it’s truly amazing to have finally reached that milestone.

The photo above is from a demo event I was at last week — taken by the reporter who wrote the story for the local paper. I’ve been to dozens of events like this, and have handed out hundreds of copies of my little fact sheet to anyone who shows interest and asks a lot of questions.

The Volt leapt out of the gate, winning dozens of awards including a sweep of all the major awards including Motor Trend’s Car of the Year, Car and Driver’s 10 Best, and so on. One group even called the 2011 Volt the “Collectible Vehicle Of The Future”.

How about the numbers?

• My average fuel consumption over the past year is 86 MPG. That represents a combination of A) nearly zero gas consumed for regular daily commuting, and B) long road trips, when the car gets 37 MPG. As you can see on this graphic, in months where we didn’t go on a roadtrip (like August) or I didn’t even need to drive to the outlying counties much, I got hundreds of miles per gallon.
• My electrical efficiency is around 35-45 kWh per 100 miles, or 350-450 Wh/mile. Those are numbers that won’t mean anything to most people, but that’s basically the same kind of measurement as MPG in a regular gas car. It’s a measure of how efficient the car is in converting stored energy in to motion. Lower is better (opposite to MPG) and my numbers are on the high side, because I drive with a lead foot and don’t scrimp on the HVAC. But even a wasteful electric car is still far more efficient than nearly any gas car on the road.
• I’ve driven about 5000 miles under electric power (around town in Atlanta) and about 3200 miles on gasoline (roadtrips to NJ, WV and AL). Those 5000 miles electric were practically free.
• It costs me 25 cents of electricity to recharge the car every night. One shiny quarter. I don’t drain the battery down all the way with my every-day driving, but even if I did the cost to charge would be 60 cents.
• I don’t spend money on gas anymore (in Atlanta) and my electric bill originally went up about $20 per month. And now that I have switched to a smarter electricity rate plan, the monthly increase is only $10 per month.
• I have 300 foot-pounds of torque and every stoplight is an opportunity for pure joy.

I suppose I should spend a moment talking about the (now tiresome) question that many people lately ask me when I mention owning a Volt: what about those car fires they’ve heard about? Heavy sigh. The whole thing is frankly amazing as a study in how nobody actually reads news anymore, they just look at headlines, and those headlines are often written by staffers who aren’t really reading the article either! Or worse, are trying to mislead or fan flames. So to speak.

So, that said, here are a couple articles (which, uh, you should actually read) that describe the actual situation rather well:

http://blog.caranddriver.com/chevy-volt-hysteria-we%E2%80%99re-all-going-to-die-or-an-application-of-facts-and-rationality-to-flaming-batteries-and-melting-chargers/

[After describing the crash testing that resulted in some Volt batteries catching fire weeks after the crash … ] If you ask us, even just one day is plenty of time to safely exit a vehicle that’s in peril of burning. And get this: We’ve even heard of [normal gasoline] cars catching fire during a crash. … We’ll also point out that the above incidents [in a test lab] are the only two known conflagrations resulting from Volt accidents; no Volt owners have had their battery packs go up in flames from real-world events—but that didn’t prevent some bogus media reports from stating such.

http://www.plugincars.com/car-fires-recals-and-politics.html

[After listing plenty of specific fire hazards in recent gasoline cars … ] All of these fire-related recalls are just what I found from the past two years, and I’m sure there are more because I hardly looked. Most of these recalls were completely missed by the press or at the best casually mentioned in the nightly news. Why is that? Why are two Volts that had fires weeks after being crash tested so much more dangerous than all of these recalls where in some cases cars burst into flames while people were driving them? I didn’t even mention the famous Ford recall in 2009 when Ford recalled 14 million vehicles because over 550 of them caught on fire, many of which while people were driving them and in some instances even burned down some homes.

No Volt owners have had any problems with battery fires, there hasn’t been a recall, and the NHTSA is still giving the Volt a 5-star crash rating.

I have been pushing to show this technology, one to one and in person, to as many people as possible, for a full year now. The fundamental reason why I have been pushing it like this is because I knew that sooner or later the inevitable success of EVs would start to really threaten the bottom of line of the current vested interests (e.g. the oil giants, companies that profit from endless oil wars, etc.) and that’s when the misinformation campaigns would begin in earnest. Let me be clear: they are lying to you, and you should simply ignore them.

You’ve probably heard of the documentary “Who Killed The Electric Car, a 2006 review of what happened to the first wave of EVs that came out in the mid to late 1990s. This year the sequel came out, called “Revenge Of The Electric Car”, and it came to Atlanta a couple weeks ago. I’m biased of course, but it really is a great movie, and you should see it. Here’s a great quote from the movie from automotive journalist Dan Neil:

“There comes a point when you know too much. For me, knowing what I know, and having been where I’ve been, gasoline-powered cars have started to become very, very bittersweet for me. And I’ve been saying goodbye, in my head, for about a year now. What I want is a car that I can live with, that goes fast and is fun and is clean. Because that’s where the imagination is, that’s where the inspiration is at, that’s the future. “

Any regrets? Not a one. The car has been fantastic, GM delivered on their promise, and I am more committed to electric vehicles than ever. After years of driving only imports (Volkswagen, Honda, Audi) I’m as surprised as anyone to be this satisfied with an American car.

When my Volt lease ends in December 2013, I plan to move on to my next car (which will likely be a regular purchase again) and it will certainly be an electric. The big decision I have to make by then is whether it will be a pure electric, or a “range extended” electric like the Volt I have now. It’s nice having the gas engine there as a backup, but it adds significant cost, weight and maintenance complexity to the car. I may decide that a 100-mile range pure electric car is good enough for me, even for “suburb days”, and I’ll just rent a car for the one or two times a year we go on a big road trip. And I might not even need to do that rare rental for roadtrips, because in the last year thousands of public charging stations have popped up all over the country (the map here is from the excellent carstations.com ) and that’s a trend that is accelerating. Or I may stick with GM and get the new Cadillac with the Volt drivetrain! Yeah, you heard me, Cadillac.

These are strange and exciting times!

Now back in Atlanta, I (Chris) have processed the panorama photos. I’ve inserted them into the appropriate posts here, so please go back (e.g. start at the beginning) and look for the super-wide photos — most days have one or two of the panorama shots.

They really need to be viewed large to be appreciated. However, even after clicking to enlarge them they’re not that big, so if you happen to be using the Firefox browser, try the Ctrl-+ (control plus) key combo to tell your browser to enlarge the photo (and text and everything). Use Ctrl-– (control minus) to reduce back down.

Or come visit us in Atlanta and we’ll show you the pictures 🙂

The weather was absolutely fantastic for the entirety of the trip in four different regions, most of which are not necessarily known for sunny weather! However that unseasonably warm weather meant we were over dressed, and the heavy coats we had packed took up room we could have used for more lighter cothing options. Oh well, better too warm than too cold.

Losses / wasted money:

• $50 in wasted museum fares in Paris due to poor communications with ticket agent
• $45 on surly Aix cab because we missed $10 bus ride to train station
• $100 sunglasses left in same cab
• $10 and unnecessary grief thanks to Metro ticket machines never working; damn you Paris RER train system!

We’re glad to be back home, where we can resume our usual activities (lately) — working on our new house …

And now the long trek back home.

Checked out of the hotel (taking our final trip in the tiny elevator), dragged over to the Metro station. The ticket machine wouldn’t take any of our credit cards, nor would it take cash. Plan B: back up to street level to get a taxi. Finally one picked us up, and the ride to where we needed to go didn’t cost an arm and a leg like the surly Aix taxi.

Alas, just like last time in 2007, the Gare du Nord did not disappoint in its display of stunning French ineptitude in running a train station. Hundreds of dreary tourists, butting their heads against ticket machines that never work, or standing in line at ticket counters with dreary rail workers. We budgeted at least an extra hour for this due to our 2007 experience and once again the RATP soaked it right up. Got to the airport, checked in, and were told we didn’t actually have seats on the flight since they’d oversold it (and probably had picked us to get kicked off since we’d purchased months ago and were worth the least money to them, or something). The ticket agent threatrically offered us a thousand dollars to stay one more day and let them book us on Sunday’s flight, which we declined, leading to more theatrics from the agent. Sharon freaked out but Chris knew it would settle out, and by the time we got to the gate itself, we’d already been cleared onto the flight. Guess someone else took the grand. The flight itself went fine. There was no in-seat on-demand movie system which with Chris could spoil himself, so he settled on watching the crap they were showing on the main screens. Which were:

1. Mr. Popper’s Penguins (just kidding, didn’t watch it, but ask Sharon …)

2. Midnight in Paris ( WP / IMDB ) — pretty good! Basically a cinematic romp through many of the early 20th century authors and art world figures you might encounter in high school English or college freshman art history class. Owen Wilson plays a depressed Hollywood screenwriter hack who inexplicably finds himself in 1920s Paris and manages to endear himself to various luminaries of the Golden Age. As usual in a Woody Allen film, the women characters are all one-dimensional muses to the Woody Allen stand-in. A great film to watch coming from a visit in Paris.

3. Arthur ( WP / IMDB ) — Russell Brand and Helen Mirren liven up this remake in what is otherwise generic Hollywood effluent, perhaps written by the Owen Wilson character above.

4. some pathetic Reese Witherspoon rom com — see commentary below for title

That last movie — I tried to ignore it, but I kept going back because I couldn’t figure it out. It is in the running for literally the worst movie I’ve ever seen. The primary actors (RW, Paul Judd and Owen Wilson, again) seemed to be dazed and working without any script. We didn’t get the movie’s title on the plane, so I was interested in looking it up when we got to the internet again, for no other reason than to see if it even had a writers credit (perhaps one Alan Smithee). So I was stunned when I found that not only had the movie, How Do You Know ( WP / IMDB ), been directed by James L. Brooks, he had written it too! Brooks being famously one of the creators of The Simpsons (alas also now one of those responsible for the continuance of The Simpsons). Maybe the writer begged off the onscreen credit and Brooks took it. Oh and they spent $120M making it! Anyway, too much ink already spilled over a vacuous piece of dreck and a terrible stain on the resumes of all involved. Well, except for Reese Witherspoon, for whom it was just par for the course. I maintain that RW hasn’t been tolerable to watch in anything since Election, and yes, I saw Walk The Line. And in between all those movies, and looking out the window, Chris drafted these last two incredibly long blog entries. It was a 10 hour flight, he had a lot of time on his hands.

OK, here we go, our one full day in Paris. We’d basically be getting to the half dozen places that we’d failed to get to during our first visit in 2008. And yes, we were in Paris for Fashion Week. First, the Catacombes. Last time, we arrived in mid afternoon to find a line around the block. This time, we showed up before they opened (just) and the line was only a few minutes long. And once we were in, the few people with us quickly thinned out and we basically had the place to ourselves to wander through. We’ve been to ossuaries before (most notably the incredible one at Kutna Hora church in Sedlec, Czech Republic) and this would be the granddaddy. It didn’t have the artistic frivolity of the Czech ossuary, but it certainly did well in sheer scale and monumental solemnity. Next, over to the Deyrolle shop, first opened in 1831 by Emile Deyrolle. Well, not shop so much as showcase of taxidermy oddities. A simple gardening shop on the ground floor leads upstairs to an astonishing array of stuffed mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and creatures of all kinds, great and small, spread among a half dozen huge rooms. Literally, they went from entire full-grown bears down to the tiniest of insects, all mounted and on display (don’t touch in French, and no pictures allowed). Sharon bought an expensive bug which will have a special place in our new home. (We were later surprised to see Deyrolle appear briefly in a scene in the Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, that they played on the plane on our way home!)

Lunchtime! Found a very nice restaurant, balked at the prices a bit and settled for a delicious lunch of two appetizers (shown is asparagus wrapped in proscuitto). Next door was a random toy shop that also separated us from more money. Sharon continues to be fixated on Barbapapa, a French children’s television show, which is an obsession that started during our last trip here four years ago! Next, the Musée Dupuytren. This is a medical museum (tucked inside the grand l’Ecole de Médecine, part of the Sorbonne) that, like everything on today’s itinerary, we’d tried to visit during our last trip but which had been closed for the school holidays at the time. It took us a bit of wandering in the l’Ecole complex to find it (including walking through a Paris Fashion Week event) but we did and it didn’t disappoint. Like Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum or the Josephinum in Vienna, both of which we’ve been to, this collection of medical oddities had been assembled over two centuries to educate medical students on the human body. More specifically, the medical abnormalities of the human body. Mostly preserved in jars of fluid but occasionally represented as wax figures, absolutely every awful disease or abnormality you’ve ever heard of was well represented here, often in triplicate. Sharon gasped at her discovery of some preserved examples of Harlequin babies, to which two other young American medical students who were in the museum responded by rushing over to see them as well. In total, the entire museum was held in one large room, but it was completely packed with specimens and probably exceeded the American museums in scale. And the curator, who is also a physician, was there and showed us around! He uses the museum to teach anatomy and pathology courses. Here’s a bunch of great photos from the Morbid Anatomy website. Moving on! At this point we were making good time, so we headed for the Musée de l’Orangerie, an entire building dedicated to Monet’s dreamlike “Water Lilies” mural series. Chris was underwhelmed and glad that we hadn’t paid extra for the 10 minutes we spent in there (we got in via our museum pass). Up next was a shop on the other side of the Louvre, and then the Louvre itself, so we had a nice long (and slow) walk down through the Tuiliries gardens. Midway we sat in some extremely comfortable chairs and did some primo people watching.

We walked towards and then basically through the Louvre gates, past the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, pictured here. Note this is not the more famous Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile, which is about two miles away at the far end of the Champs-Élysées. In this photo, looking east, you can see the iconic Louvre Pyramid framed inside the arch.

Through the Louvre plaza to the other side, we reached the Artoyz shop. This tiny shop specializes in otaku, which is basically hipster toys usually inspired by Japanese culture. In other words, crack for Sharon.

And finally, our last official destination of our Paris trip — the Louvre. As we did last time, many people just avoid the Louvre because it is so daunting, and you could spend months here and still not see everything. This time we did tackle it — we spent 3 hours simply wandering the halls (independently), seeking out various obvious highlights — a Mona Lisa here, a Venus de Milo there, et cetera. Chris was most stunned by the entire medieval fortress (that the Louvre was eventually built over) that had been excavated out under one of the wings. The Louvre is a museum without peer — it is an entire city of artwork, the entirety of human artistic endeavor under one roof, from the Code of Hammurabi to Napoleanic decorative riches. At some point in the Louvre we caught a bite to eat at a cafe, so afterwards it was straight back to the hotel to collapse.

Dupuytren

Today was to be mostly about getting to Paris and other logistics, but we’d have one bit of Paris sightseeing at the end.

We packed up, cleaned up the condo, and drove the two hours back to the Marseilles airport where Uncle Andreas keeps the car (he’ll be coming down from Munich himself next week). We just missed the shuttle bus to the train station, so got a taxi. This taxi driver was particularly surly, even by French standards. He didn’t even grunt when Chris gave him a tip on top of the exhorbitant fare; later Chris discovered that he’d left his sunglasses in the cab, so that bastard got those too.

Thankfully the TGV ride to Paris was just about perfect. TGV stands for Train Grand Vitesse, or simply high speed train. The station was easy to navigate, the train was right on time, and we quickly found our seats. Chris had sprung for first class fares, which meant assigned seats, big ones, quiet car (cell phones banned), big windows. Chris watched the countryside go by — and with a trip from Provence to Paris, you are watching a large part of France go by indeed. The Massif Central (the “massive” mountainous region in central France, sparsely populated) loomed to our west as we coursed up the Rhone valley at speeds of around 180 MPH. We arrived in Paris in the Gare du Lyon train station, and from there we caught a couple Metro (subway) connections. The weather for our entire European trip has been unseasonably warm and Paris would be no exception. The Metro is not air conditioned, and with our 5pm arrival in the city we were right in the middle of the sweltering rush hour crowds. Dragging heavy suitcases. Not knowing exactly where we were going. Oppressive heat aside, the Metro whisked us to our hotel’s neighborhood (Saint-Germain-des-Prés), within two blocks of the station we had finally reached our hotel for the next two nights. Tucked into a courtyard off the quiet Rue Jacob, the Hotel Marronniers is your typical Parisian hotel, with tiny everything — tiny lobby, tiny elevator, ludicrously tiny shower … but a great location. And we lucked out (well, Chris had asked for it a month ago) and got one of the few rooms at the top of the hotel (at the hotel’s attic level, basically) that overlooked the courtyard, with a view to the Saint Germaine church (and beyond, the controversial Montparnasse tower). After a respite and a quick wash to remove the Paris Metro slime, we were back out on the streets. Tonight’s one destination would be the Musée d’Orsay, which we had only had a chance to literally speed through (in 15 minutes) during our first trip to Paris in December 2008. This time we had 2-3 hours to soak it in. The building is an 1890’s train station, a gargantuan open hall, that was converted in the 1980s into this museum. The Louvre has all of the French national art treasures from antiquity through about 1848, and that’s where the Musée d’Orsay picks up, with paintings and sculpture and everything else from the second half of the 1800’s and on into the 1900’s. As we would also see later in the Louvre, the scale of the building allows them to put on display truly huge artwork, such as the scenes by Courbet, but there were also plenty of small spaces for more intimate works (such as, ~cough~, some paintings by Courbet).

At 9:30pm they started kicking everyone out, so it was finally time for our late dinner. After a few misfires, we found a restaurant still open and had a simple but fantastic meal — a french onion soup appetizer, veal scallopine, a “salad” with everything (shown here), wine and beer.

Chris got sick last night, and so today we just stayed in and focused on relaxation and getting better.

Things we were going to do today:

Pont du Gard roman aqueduct

Avignon and papal palace

Saint Remy

Luberon: Gordes and Rouuuillulililiooon

By evening Chris was feeling better, so we’d be back at full speed in the morning!

The Camargue is a wetland on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Camargue horses (wild and not), bulls and birds of all kinds populate this area. Sources of income include sea salt, rice farming, lavendar and olive products.

We went to the Parc Ornithologique de Pont de Gau bird sanctuary. The park is filled with marshy lagoons with flocks of flamingos, swans, dozens of kinds of ducks, geese, egrets, etc. We also saw a muskrat hanging out, eating grass. This became less wondersome when we found a family of three muskrats a few feet from the snack shop grazing on grasses.

Up next was Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (“Saint Marys of the Sea”). This coastal town is famous as the supposed place where the three Marys (Mary Salome, Mary Jacobe, and Mary Magdalene) first landed when they fled Egypt. The patron saint of the local gypsies is Saint Sara (aka Black Sara), who may have been an Egyptian slave that arrived with the Marys. We approached a lovely stone church and were spotted by several gypsy women who tried to sell us religious medals. While Sharon perused the local shops for booty, Chris went up into the church tower. You can walk around the perimeter of the church roof and see the town and environs for many miles around, and actually you can climb on the gabled stone roof itself. A little scary but fun!

Heading back inland the way we came, our next stop was the Chateau de Avignon. Alas, closed on Tuesdays.

Just down the road a bit further was the Musée de la Camargue, which is a modest farmhouse that recreates the rural conditions of the Camargue farmer. Alas it was closed, in defiance of the sign saying it was supposed to be open. Next to the museum was a large fenced in pen with two horses standing next to each other. One of the horses got to its knees and then rolled over and took a very ungraceful dust bath. We went over to the pen and Sharon clucked at them, upon which they both came right over to the fence and let us pet them and feed them almonds. Once we ran out of almonds they nuzzled our arms, and by “nuzzle” we mean “chewed on our skin with their lips and even teeth”. We played and petted them for about 15 minutes and we were sad to leave.

We headed west out of the Camargue wetlands proper to towards Aiges-Mortes, an entire town within a gigantic fortress.

The exterior walls are ramparts with firing holes where the soldiers would try to fend off approaching armies. We went up into a tower of the fortress where the evil protestants were held at one time. We walked part of the ramparts and could see for miles around. People live inside the fortress and have shops and cafes going, where they refuse to serve meals at appropriate times. The museum shop had a cat that was very used to the crowds of young students on field trips.

We returned to Port Camargue and went to the “Super U”, sort of a multi-purpose store with amazing (to us) groceries and clothes and hardware. Probably the French equivalent of Walmart. We had dinner in Le Grau-du-Roi and returned home, exhausted.

We woke a bit late because we had spent much of the night battling the literally infamous Port Camargue mosquitos. We had a light breakfast of bread and cheese and coffee in town and hit the road. Chris enjoyed driving around the many round-abouts, which is generally how they handle road intersections here.

We entered the city of Arles, which in antiquity was a major Mediterranean seaport (up the Rhone river) under Roman rule starting with Julius Caesar. As is typical with Roman cities, there was a huge arena (similar to the iconic Colosseum of Rome) that was used for gladiator fighting and other “popular” entertainment, and then also a theater for more refined tastes. Both were open to the public but under renovation — perpetual renovation being the hallmark of these places. There is also much Van Gogh history too, as he spent a year here painting the countryside.

After wandering Arles for a bit, we hit the road again, stopping first to fuel up the car. Diesels are extremely popular cars all over Europe, both due to their inherent efficiency and even some government subsidies. Nearly every car model is offered with a diesel version, and the muffled clatter of the diesel engine is heard everywhere here. A stop at the gas station tells you why they are so sensitive to efficiency here — gas and diesel cost twice as much here as in the U.S. Filling up the small VW’s tank costed us $100.

Back on the road, after only a couple miles we reached the Abbeye de Montmajour. Well, actually we tried to get a late lunch at the little open-air restaurant across the road from the abbey, but ran into the fact that restaurants in France open for lunch, close for a few hours, then re-open at 7pm for dinner. And so began our trip of gentle starvation.

Anyway, back to the abbey. Built on top of (and in some places carved into) a small rocky outcrop, this Benedectine monastery was just an incredible place. From the gravesites carved into solid rock (see above picture) to the massive stone arches to the tower with the stunning views of the countryside, this was one of our favorite destinations. Most freaky of all were the gargoyle carvings on the columns around the cloister, such as this one of the fabled tarasque monster having a snack. And then we stumbled across a little gallery in the middle of it all, where the french artist Nicolas Guilbert, had been commissioned to do some photography of the site, involving animals.

Down the road a little further, we stopped in the small town of Fontvieille to get some lunch. Well, again, there was no lunch proper to be had, but the cafe we stopped at was serving drinks and pastries, so we basically had a lunch of sugar, including the best apple pie that Sharon had ever had.

At this point it was getting late in the afternoon, so we made one last stop of our trek — a climb to the little village of Les Baux. Located high on an Alpilles mountain peak, this tiny village is basically carved into the hillside just below some ancient castle ruins. We got there just at closing time for the castle grounds proper, and had just missed a demonstration of their trebuchet, one of the largest in the world. Guess what the armies would often use as ammo for these gigantic slinging machines to throw at their opponents? Captured opponent soldiers! Geneva Convention, huh.

Back to Port Camargue. For a real dinner (hooray!). The Michelin-rated restaurant L’amarette was recommended to us by Andreas and others. We had a prix-fixe menu with beef, salmon, fish, shrimp, a great local white wine and a chariot de fromages. That’s right, a chariot of cheeses. Dessert was a variety of sorbets and creme brule. Yum.

We waddled back to the apartment and slept with the windows closed to avoid the mosquito onslaught.

In the morning there was more bustle with cleaning up and a post party brunch with leftovers from the previous day. Breads, cheeses, weisewurst, sausage salad and cakes were all consumed as well as coffee with beer chasers. That’s right, beer for breakfast. We packed up, said our goodbyes and Renate drove us to the airport.

Bye Jazz!

Our first plane took us to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt we flew to Marseille in the south of France. Uncle Andreas owns an condo in Port Camargue, a kind-of prefab marina town on the coast of the Mediterranean sea.

The Camargue region is famous for its flamingos, bulls, sailing and seafood, and would make a great launching point for our trips into Provence. The town we were staying in, Port Camargue, is just west of the Petit Rhone and thus officially out of Provence, but this phase of the trip would really be all about Provence. Just above Port Camargue is Provence, to the southwest of PC the French cost curves south towards Spain.

Andreas leaves a modest car at the airport, which we found and got ourselves packed into. From the airport we drove west, first through the industrial grime that is the outskirts of Marseilles and then finally into the mirror-flat coastal countryside of southern Provence. It had been a while since Chris had driven a manual transmission car (or even a gas car, for that matter) but he got the hang of it. We arrived at the apartment around 9pm, settled in and prepared for a busy few days in Provence.

Mediterranean