Day 10 July 19, 2007

Arles, France

We got up around 8am this morning and ate a small breakfast at the chateau before loading up the car. Voila! Turns out that the Golf has extra trunk storage underneath a hidden panel, so all of our luggage fits in the trunk except for one small duffle – yay! We drove southeast to Toulouse where we stopped for a relaxing lunch at a sidewalk cafe. Toulouse has a very active street scene shaded by beautiful old sycamore trees. There’s also a canal that runs through the center of town, so everything is lovely! After lunch, we got back in the car and continued southeast past Carcassone (we saw the medieval city up on a hill from our car) then on to Montpellier to catch the finish of Stage 11 of the Tour de France. Finding the finish line was a bit of a struggle since it wasn’t in the town itself but rather in a small suburb just north of the city center (Centre Ville). We finally found it and saw the final riders cross the line. There were a couple of souvenir tents set up, so we decided to help the French economy a bit. The traffic getting out of town and back onto the autoroute was insane! It took us almost 2 hours to get on the highway! Needless to say, Matthew wasn’t too happy, though Emma was content to kick back and listen to her iPod! We continued east at that point into Arles. We followed the signs to the old city and finally found our hotel (Acacias). The hotel is modern, so there was an elevator, thankfully, but the room was a bit small though it was airconditioned! We walked through the old city to find a bistro for dinner. We ended up at a sidewalk table of a crowded restaurant, which was perfect. Dinner was moules frites, a good bottle of local wine (which Emma thought tasted like Robutussin!), and very friendly service. Our waiter did a crafty thing with the wine cork – he twisted the foil and made a little collar to hold the cork against the bottle – very cute! After dinner, we walked back to our hotel and went to sleep.