We have a few long-ish road trips planned for this summer, so we figured it was a good idea to give the long-haul drive with Oliver a trial run while Michael's mom was in town last month, and headed to the South of France for a long weekend. A good friend of ours has a beautiful house near Provence, which is a tiny slice of heaven on earth. She very generously offered it to us as a bit of a respite from the city, for which we are eternally grateful and extremely lucky. While we love our apartment in Paris, it starts to feel quite small after a while, especially with the ridiculous amount of gear that a newborn requires. Any road trip that involves Paris will most certainly involve traffic. At most hours of the day, cars are jammed getting into and out of the city. So to avoid this hassle with a small baby who does NOT like stop and go traffic (let's be honest, neither do any of us), we headed out at 6:30am. This is what our little nugget looked like at the start of the trip... happy and oblivious as to the long day that awaited him! I think I've mentioned it before, but the French autoroute is pricey but excellent, offering full-service rest stops every 15 miles or so. We took advantage of plenty of them, and pulled off the road every 1.5 to 2 hours, turning what is normally a 7-8 hour drive into closer to 11 hours on the road (also hitting traffic around Lyon). It was a bit grueling for me as the solo driver (Michael joined by train in Avignon), but the reward in the end was five glorious days spent relaxing in the garden, around town, and in neighboring villages. While most of our time was spent near home base in Vinsobres, we took a day to visit the Antique Roman Amphitheater in Orange, which dates back to the 1st century AD, and is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as the best preserved theater in Europe. It did not disappoint. If we had more time, we would have loved to attend a concert there, as it's still a working venue. For this trip, we had to suffice it to climb up to the top for a killer panoramic view.
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AuthorBecause why not get married and move to Paris to really kick off your thirties? Archives
December 2016
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