Nîmes to Vaision-La-Romaine

Saturday, June 11 ~~ Sunny and balmy (again!)

After the hectic last few days, we both wanted a place to relax!  We had been heading further East than we expected, and so we looked for a small-ish town in Provence - and we found Vaison-La-Romaine.

There is no direct route to Vaison-La-Romaine, so we took the train from Nîmes to Avignon, then another train to Orange, then a bus to VLR.  We had enough time in Avignon to buy a fast lunch (my first croque-monsieur, which was pretty good!).  But then we had over 3 hours in Orange!  We stowed our bags at the station (and the camera too, darn it!), and headed into town to see the sights. You can follow our route (look for Day 11) on our trip map: Julie and Rick in France 2011.

We got back to the station in plenty of time - we sat on a bench in the sun and chatted with a fellow traveler.  He had been to the area several times, so he pointed out a few things on our way.  When we got to VLR, he met his traveling companions, and they took us into the center of town in their car!  What a treat!  This was the first town we had been to where we didn't have even a basic map, and it was a smidgen daunting - much easier to start out in the center of town.

After realizing there were two plazas very near each other, we found our hotel on the second one. 
The first plaza was completely filled with *more* festival booths!  The Pentecost festival was in full swing here as well, but in a small-town way.  There was a parade at about 9:30 pm, with about half a dozen bands separated by floats.  All of the floats were filled with children in costume - very cute!  It was such a short parade, it repeated the route three times :-).