Les Beaux…Le Bust

Cindy prepping for a big day of travel

June 17: We left our apartment in Girona, where we'd had a chance to do laundry (yay!!), at a civilized hour. Stopped for breakfast at the bakery, strolled to the station, and found our way down to the train platform--the very platform we had not seen except from the train window when we missed getting off the train two days before.

We were now on our way to Les Baux de Provence, a destination we had added at the urging of very dear friends. I will add right here that this stop seemed from the start of our planning to perhaps be more trouble than it would be worth ( although we were assured that it would be the BEST, and we were excited to see the Carrières des Lumières exhibit, "From Vermeer to Van Gogh" and the Chateau). There are no trains to Les Baux. There are few and infrequent buses there. We finally found a regional car-for-hire agency and reserved a round-trip driver to get us from the train station to the place we were renting and back after our two-day stay.

Our first train was to Narbonne, France. Second train to Nimes, and a third to Arles. Much of it was a beautiful ride along the coast of the Golfe du Lion, until we needed to go inland to Nimes. We had a long enough wait in Nimes to take advantage of the hot weather and go across the plaza to La Brasserie Les Fleurs for a cold glass of rose.

The Nimes train station was also quite picturesque, as was the scenery out the window heading to Arles.

We got to Arles at 4:50 and our driver arrived at 5:00 as promised to take us to Les Baux. His name was Yahya, and he was charming--and despite his English limitations and our even bigger French failings, we had a decent conversation on the way to Les Baux. With a bit of difficulty we found the place we were renting. At that point, Yahya asked if we needed a driver while we were there. Not at all, we assured him. We're walkers, and we'll just walk to the town, just like we'd done everywhere else we had gone. Bath, Sarlat...we were already used to not being in the center of things. Not a problem.

So he drove off, and we finally found our apartment in a very dark, seemingly barely finished complex (our Airbnb host's notes also indicated that the apartment was newly in her possession, so there were some thing unfinished). We dropped our bags in the apartment and set off for town, which our host said was about a kilometer away.

As we left the complex we noticed that we seemed to be in a suburban neighborhood (i.e., no sidewalks, no sign of the town of Les Baux in close proximity). My map app directed us to walk down the road (a main road with no sidewalks and almost no shoulders) a quarter of a mile and then turn off on a path that would shortcut toward town. The path turned out to be rough, rocky, and a steep climb up and back down--and the town seemed no closer. Neither one of us was prepared for such a rigorous hike just to get to the town.

This might have been the moment when Cindy was declaring that she definitely wasn't going to walk back from town this way.

The view from the top of our path through the woods. It was beautiful--if you were out for a day's hike with no goal beyond the hike itself.

We trudged on. Finally came to a place where there were at least some houses--and then discovered we had to climb a lot of steps to reach the town, which still looked quite a distance away.

And so...up the steps.

And up.

Perhaps this is where the Romans prayed to the gods to deliver an escalator to take them to the town...

And finally we came to a parking lot. Hooray! But...more steps--but a sign:

More steps.

We made it to the top, to the town. Les Baux must have certainly been a town that was easy to defend from invaders. They'd be too exhausted to attack until they'd rested overnight, for starters.

And speaking of overnight...Cindy and I were immediately trying to figure out how to get back to our place without doing that hike again. But we also had another challenge. It was Sunday evening, and Les Baux was close to closing down for the night. We wanted to see if we could find a taxi of some sort to drive us back to the apartment. My phone at that time wasn't working (more likely, I didn't know how to make a call, but that's another uninteresting story), so we asked a shopkeeper if he could call a taxi for us. He told us that he thought there was only one service like that, and he tried calling the number to no answer. So we went to the only other shop we could find. The women there were quite sympathetic but they had no suggestions. However, they did have delicious biscuits (you know, what we call cookies in the US), which weren't too sweet, so we bought some of those because we were pretty sure we wouldn't be able to find anything else to eat.

Sitting in a little plaza wondering how to get back to that place...we were approached by a woman who asked if we could take a photo of her. Sure...and we got to talking about how hard it is to be in Les Baux without a car. She said she had had to hire a driver to get from her hotel to the town. We told her our sad tale and she (bless her for the rest of her days!) suggested that perhaps her driver, for whom she was waiting at that moment, might be able to be hired to drive us back to our apartment. She went off to call him, and shortly we were introduced to him and he agreed to give us a ride for a price that seemed reasonable enough (any price would have seemed reasonable right then). He and our new friend took off and we settled in to wait for his return.

Cindy went to the one restaurant that was still open--but no longer seating for dinner--to see if she could get any food. No, but he could sell her a bottle of wine.

It was a very good wine...and that and the biscuits were our dinner that evening and our early breakfast the next morning. And we got back to the apartment, with no solution for the rest of our time there; this private driver was too busy to add us to his schedule.

We discovered that the apartment had no internet connection and almost no cellular connection. For the only time on this trip (before and after Les Baux), we felt isolated and trapped. After much discussion, I emailed Yahya to see if he could come pick us up in the morning and take us to Arles.

We had decided to simply abort that stay, forfeit the money we had paid for the experiences we'd reserved in advance, and head to Arles for a day and a night. We found an Airbnb place that was available for a decent price, and I would contact Airbnb to see if I could get a refund on our second night in Les Baux.

Yahya was happy to pick us up the next morning, and he advised me on how to cancel the return trip we'd already booked with him (through the agency) so that we wouldn't lose that money.

Our Les Baux Airbnb host was dinged for misstating the distance (1 km) her apartment is from the town (the "shortcut" hike was about two kilometers and the road is about three kilometers, which is just not a good thing for folks without a car (or maybe good cyclists). We did get our second night refunded, and Arles turned out to be a delight.

I end this too long, tedious story with a photo from our second breakfast (remember, our first breakfast of the day was wine and cookies) that next morning. How lovely it was!