Arrive in Avignon
Saturday, August 20, 2005
We had decided to get up nice and early today so that we could get onto the internet and send an urgent email before catching our train at 10.15. Unfortunately though I had got to a particularly good point in my book last night and couldn’t put it down, so when I looked at the clock and it was after 1am I was a little worried that we wouldn’t wake up in time, opening the curtains so as to let the sun wake me. Lucky for me it worked and I woke at 8.15 giving us heaps of time to get ready before the internet café opened at 9. It took a little longer than we hoped at the internet café so we had a half walk / jog to make the train we wanted, getting to the station with minutes to spare, we looked at the board only to find it wasn’t there. Cursing the tourist info man we made our way to the info desk and found out that we had been given the timetable for weekdays instead of the weekends but luckily Avignon is a major destination from Marseilles and it was only a 45 minute wait before the next train. This was a little worrying as we had to get to our hostel before 2pm in order to check in before they close down for four hours until 6pm.We arrived at 1pm giving us an hour to find the bus and hopefully catch one to the hostel before they closed. This, we thought, was heaps of time until we walked out of the station to basically a car park with no sign of the busses anywhere. Running out of time we managed to find out that the busses were just inside the city walls - which were just across the road. We arrived to the hostel at 1.55pm running up the small hill to the reception and pulling on the door to find it locked - bugger. There was a notice to the side explaining that we couldn’t check in until 6 but if we wanted to leave our bags locked in the office to contact the restaurant. This was ok though as they had an outside area where we could sit and read as well as a pool so it was quite easy to fill in the four hours that we had to wait. The room is very nice especially since it’s the cheapest hostel that we have stayed coming in at half the amount of the most expensive place which was in Rome. We sat by the pool and just baked in the sun for four hours feeing good that we at lest had a bed for the night, checking in just after 6. Stupidly, we only then realised that it was a Saturday meaning that things would be closing very soon and not opening until Monday, so, jumping on the second to last bus for the day we headed into Avignon, hoping that we would find a supermarket and something for dinner. It turned out that the city was shutting down when we got there but we did find a supermarket and got a quick takeaway for dinner rushing back to get the last bus at 7.45pm back. For the rest of the night we sat and tried to figure out our itinerary for the rest of our holiday - which ended with the same as always, just a vague idea of the places we still want to go and dates beside them. Good news is that we are ahead of schedule and have a six day buffer at the end of our holiday which we think will end in Berlin. Anyway once it was dark I wanted to go and take a photo of the city from the restaurant balcony as it had a magic view of the Pope’s Palace. We walked out the door and down the stairs when someone can running past us with two cameras heading the same way we were. Excited now, we walked out onto the balcony to see the most impressive view, with a massive full moon rising directly above the palace. After a few photos of this we started talking to the guy that had rushed past us and his friend, they were German and were travelling France for the first time. They had been camping for most of there time in France but they had decided that it was high time for a good nights sleep in a bed. We ended up talking to them for a couple of hours on the balcony before being told that it was probably time that we went to bed by one of the hostel staff.
posted by Maarty @ 12:00 am,
1 Comments:
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At Wednesday, 01 July, 2009,
said...
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What the hostel called? im going to avignon later this month, looking for a place to stay.