Day 4 C’est la ve.

When arriving in a new town a traveller is faced with many challenges. First is to find the hotel you have booked.  Some like the excitement of booking a hotel when you arrive in a town, but we find that if you do that, the best rooms in the most popular places are all gone. So if you book all your accommodation before you leave home then the only hassle is to actually find the place. Now of course some people just catch a taxi when they arrive at a new town, but that is expensive and no fun. We have learnt to seek out directions before hand and on this trip we have discovered the value of bringing a printed copy of a Google map. Despite our preparations, today we experienced a few navigation dramas before we arrived at our rustic thirteen-room hotel in the old part of town – 16^th century Hotel des Quarte Dauphins.

The next challenge is working out how to see the town in the most efficient and enjoyable way. You could go on a paid walking tour, but they are often very longwinded and slow. You could ride the daggy little tourist train around the old town with commentary in five languages, but you would look like a dill and be considered a failure as an independent traveller. You could study the maps for some time and plan out an effective route, but that would be too sensible.

No we find the most fun is to have a good map and then just wander. We stumbled early upon the most famous street in Aix-en-Provence, Cours Mirabella with its magnificent old private mansions, enormous plane trees, glorious fountains and a textile market that is teeming with life and then within an hour is packed up and gone. We discovered that the fountain of four dolphins just outside our hotel is about 500 years old and is one of Aix’s finest. We noticed in the shops a local sweet  that has  been around since King Rene in the 15^th century. We cover about 15 kms in a glorious ‘shorts and T-shirt’ mid summer Mediterranean day.

Lunch at Charlotte is a Lonely Planet triumph. Found in an obscure backstreet, we feel we have really arrived in France as we eat a local delicacy, which could be accurately described as raw mince.

C’est la ve.