This is our hotel for the previous 2 nights. We were on the third floor up a very narrow spiral stair case - no elevator, not even for luggage. A continental breakfast of sorts was served. Another narrow street - so I had to use my 15mm fisheye lens to pull in all the hotel front.
This is Elaine's car in a public parking garage where we warehoused the car while we saw the sights in Avignon. The parking spaces are extremely tight - I've never seen anything like it in the GTA - almost comical, except try and get in and out! Thank goodness the side view mirrors fold in.
We visited a large Monastery outside Avignon. It's name is La Charteuse du Val de Benediction. It was founded by the French Pope residing in Avignon, Innocent VI, in the late 1300s. In fact he is buried there. The order of this Monastery was the Carthusians, who seem to have some interesting non-Roman ideas about Christianity.
The tomb of Pope Innocent VI.
A monks room. This seemed like a fairly well-to-do group as the buildings are mostly limestone and there appears to be plenty of space. Many of the buildings are individual houses attached to a covered stone corridor system. There are two of these systems plus a number of large common-use buildings. The image above is the main room of one of the residential buildings.
Near the town Les Baux de Provence we visited a the audio visual show "Monet, Renoir ... Chagal. Voyages en Mediterranee." The setting is a limestone mine that is closed to mining. Inside this huge room with enormous limestone columns supporting the rock roof above, an incredible multi-projector show presented the work of the titled artists to the backdrop of wonderful classical music.
Although there seems to be reasonable light in these images, the room was quite dark during the show. I have purposely overexposed the image.
The image above is more representative of the lighting levels during the show. The image below is the same view as the one above - it shows the base condition of the mine, and how it is marvellously transformed into the image above. The curvature of the walls is an artifact of the fish-eye lens I used to take the image.
This is the outside of the mine. Below is the local terrain - very sharply hilly.
We drove to Aix-en-provence, a city north of Marseilles. We had lunch outside in a plaza in front of the very old church shown below. As we discovered, it is actually the Cathedral of Saint Sauveur, a very old Christian site dating to the Romans.
After this, we drove to Marseille to our hotel on the outskirts of the City. We are here for two nights.
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