We had also used that time, in between eating hard boiled egg sandwiches, to ask the lost and found about how I might be able to locate my beloved "les lunerettes de soliel et de vue brun"[82]. Though the man who helped me seemed as if it was old hat and easily determined which train and where to look, the attendants on the other end were apparently not as helpful, and never picked up their phone. So, knowing that we would be going through Lyon at some point later in our trip, he wrote down all the information for me and wished me luck.

We got to Avignon before noon, and headed into town for the TI. How interesting...it was made out of a converted church...how often does a TI have flying buttresses? Anyway, we asked a woman there when the next bus to Pont du Gard would be. She said 5:30 pm. What? Yes, she confirmed that the only two busses that go to Pont du Gard are at 7:30 am and 5:30 pm. But it is less than 15 miles away! What a crazy system. So I guessed that, like Pisa, we'd have to live off of all those many photographs for a while. Oh well. So we then asked her what there was to do here, in Avignon, for a few hours until an afternoon train. She gave us a map and pointed out a few things that interested us, then offered up the back room in the TI as a place we could hold our bags for free, just as long as we understood that they were closed from 1-2 pm, How nice!

Doug complies (barely) with my request to take a picture in front of the Papal Palace

Well, would you use this?

" ...l'on y danse, l'on y danse... "

Having enough of the views and the wind, we headed back, stopping for the WC by the giant carousel in the middle of Main street, and for two very expensive, albeit very tasty, eclairs on the way back to the TI. We picked up our bags just as the TI opened again at 2 pm, and headed for the train station in time for the 2:26 TGV to Grenoble. We had waited at the track for a few minutes when, I don't know which of us thought it might be good to double check to see if we needed to pay any special supplement to use the TGV. Doug ran down, waited for an uncomfortably long period of time, and then rushed back saying we needed to make reservations! We both ran to the ticket office, and a mere three minutes before our train left, we paid an extra $3 each (rip-off) for two seats on that train. Luckily we made it back on time!

As the TGV pulled up to the track, I was excited about getting on because 1) it looked modern, very sleek, and potentially very fast and 2) we had both just seen "Mission Impossible" back home[86]. But when we got on, it was terribly crowded, cramped, uncomfortable, and...what was this, there were people in the seats we just paid extra money for!?! But they politely moved, and we found it amusing that they had a bag that said `Sacramento' on it --we asked them if they were from Sacramento, too, but they said no, they were from Switzerland...we both got a laugh out of it. That was probably the best part of that train ride, though, because the train wasn't even direct to Grenoble, nobody ever checked to see that we had those expensive reservations, and let me tell you, it is very hard to use the bathroom on a train going that fast! Actually, come to think of it, it really didn't seem like we were going much faster than the normal, 90 mph trains. What a rip off. Tom Cruise, why don't you just take a milk train next time.

Like I said, the train was not direct to Grenoble, so we had to get off at Valense to switch trains. It looked at first like we had blown it by getting off, since our track assignment was the same and the time for our connection had passed, but it did come along shortly after. We took the next train to Voiron, amazed that nobody ever checked our train pass once that day. We walked out of the station in search of a hotel, or rather, in search of the hotel where Doug stayed in '93 that included a steak dinner in the $30 cost for the room. It was unfortunately no longer where it had once stood, so we walked further down the street to a bar/hotel combination. Knowing how well it worked for us back in Lucerne, we braved it, and were rewarded with a room with a bath[87] for 140F...$28?!?! An intoxicated older man at the bar tugged at Doug's sleeve as we were being signed in as "les jeunes mariés"[88], and he mumbled in French something like: "You have a beautiful wife...you are a very lucky man!"--at that point I knew we had found our place! Run down and a little unsettling, but cute and cheap!

We gave Pascal a call and he came to pick us up not long after settling in. Now you must understand something very important about Pascal Mallet...he was a classmate of Doug's Uncle Mike in Montpellier 20 years ago, and Doug looked him up when we came to Europe in both 1989 and 1993, so now he was Doug's friend, too. But in between the time of meeting Mike and meeting Doug, Pascal had had an accident while diving into a lake, and landed on a sharp rock squarely on his back, breaking one of his vertebrae and paralyzing him from the waist down and partially on one of his arms.

Pascal in his specially made car. Notice the accelerator ring inside the steering wheel!

Pascal then took us out on the outskirts of the city to a restaurant he'd heard about through some sort of family connection neither of us can remember. He had made reservations[89] there at the Auberge du Grand Jet, but we were amazed that we happened to be the only people in the whole restaurant. It was such a memorable event, though! Looking more like a converted cabin, the restaurant was, well, just so FRENCH! This time, you could only order from the Menu du Jour, although there were different choices on the menus at 80F, 100F, or 120F, all of which included massive amounts of French cuisine[90] with a salad, entree, cheese[91], and dessert[92].

Though it was very strong and unusual for me, I enjoyed the authenticity of the food, and the experience of being totally submersed in the culture. Totally new, but totally French. Not brave enough, though, to order the `cow face' and `pigeon' like Pascal did, I ordered a potato dish with what Pascal called "too strong cheese"[93]. I ended up stealing most of the plain potatoes from Doug's dish, however, since the `meat plate' salad I got was far too weird. But no matter how strange the ingredients were, each and every dish came to us so meticulously and artistically arranged, it was a shame to mess it up.

We sat there for at least three hours, Doug and Pascal finishing off an entire bottle of wine and an aperitif Pascal introduced Doug to something called "Chartreuse". He exclaimed that it was made in the hills just on the outside of this restaurant[94], and Doug fell in love with it. And then it wasn't long before one of the owners came out and had us sample his own pear aperitif. Then more men appeared, and I think even more `family labels' came out. How French! Though I was pretty lost in the language, it was fun to hear everybody talking about everything, including the piano in the hallway that was definitely for looks only[95].

When it was all done, Pascal totally insisted on paying the $100+ bill...boy were we lucky! Doug and Pascal both too drunk to drive, it was up to me to drive home; as if driving in a foreign country in a foreign car wasn't an adventure enough, I would have to adapt to an altered car, too! Actually, it was a lot of fun once I got used to it. I originally tried to use the pedals like I normally would, but the lever contraptions kept getting in the way so I decided to just do it the way Pascal did. Though it was complicated, it became quite easy to do everything with my hands--the only difficult part was switching into neutral at stops fast enough to avoid the obnoxious shuddering his 13-year-old car made. We finally made it back to our hotel in one piece, Pascal assuring us that he could drive the couple blocks or so more to get himself home. Walking up to our room, we noticed for the first time that we were staying in the "Hotel Chartreuse!"

How French!