Paris, Nimes and Uzes

Awesome – travelling again. An old school friend of mine, who I’ve known since before I can remember, is getting married in Germany. We’ve taken the opportunity to add a few weeks’ holiday on either side of the wedding; it seemed a long way to come to not spend some weeks having a mooch around. It’s been an incredible week and a half. It’s hard to believe it has been such a short time; it feels like we have done so much.

We landed in Paris at 7am on a Thursday and after a couple of hours trying to locate our lost luggage, we eventually made our way into the city. We left our recently found luggage at the Gare du Nord station and wandered indirectly towards a vegan restaurant we had researched earlier. The food was nice, but not overwhelming; we both had cannelloni and a dessert. Outside by the river, some locals were playing petanque, presumably not ironically.

That evening my parents arrived from the UK and came around to our little apartment for dinner and scheming. We mapped out our next three days in Paris together.

The first day we went to the catacombs, a massive network of underground tunnels filled with neatly stacked human bones from several former 18th and 19th century cemeteries. We were pleased with ourselves for getting there 15 minutes before opening time, but our smugness had waned a little after two hours of queuing in the hot sun. The wait was definitely worth it though; it is a unique and fascinating tour, if a little gruesome. The bones had initially just been dumped in the catacombs, but someone with a bit of foresight and respect had them erected as a sort of monument to the dead.

In the afternoon we headed to the Champs Elysees and had a bit of a wander and some lunch, before ending up around the Louvre (but no time to go in). The scale of the palatial buildings was impressive; it’s surely no wonder the peasants revolted.

The next day we started out at Notre Dame, where the views from the tower are fantastic. We then revisited the Louvre, but this time we had a look around. It is incredible, but I must say I felt the Mona Lisa was a bit of a let-down. I must be missing something. From there we headed to the Centre Pompidou for some more modern art in a brilliant building. A really packed day.

Our last day in Paris was devoted to a day trip to Versailles. The Palace and grounds are absolutely crass in their scale. You could spend days in the grounds and not see everything. A great place for hide and seek, if you play the long game. We were all pretty exhausted after all the walking, but still summonsed up the energy for one last charge to Marie Antoinette’s residence at the far end of the estate. It is built like a fairytale English hamlet, complete with beautiful vegetable gardens and flower plantations.

We had a great time with my parents, and think they were suitably worn out by the time we left them and headed south to Nimes. Our friend F was there to meet us in Nimes with her lovely baby R. We piled in the back of the van and headed to a camping ground in the small town of Sommieres, a cute little place with an ancient, still-inhabited bridge. We spent three nights there under our tarpaulins, eating delicious food, drinking the odd beer, and generally relaxing. We also managed a day trip back into Nimes where we wandered through the old town, past the Roman amphitheatre, the imaginatively named Maison Carre (square house), and up to a lookout point from an old tower on the hill overlooking the gardens.

We moved campsites after three nights, heading for the beautiful town of Uzes, via the vast Roman aqueduct, Pont du Gard (photo below). Although we couldn’t find the campsite, we found a site a few kilometres away near St Quentin La Poterie. We downsized from two tarps to one owing to the superior shade from the plentiful trees.

Back in Uzes we followed a walk around the old town, into the market square, past the old church, past the castle and through the town hall, all following narrow winding Mediterranean laneways. We stopped in at a little local vegetarian restaurant co-op for a beautiful lunch too, so it was all round a lovely day in the town. On our way back into Nimes for another night of camping (no tarps this time), we spent a few hours wandering around St Quentin La Poterie, which was another even tinier picturesque town. As the name of the town would suggest, the town is well-known for its pottery. The streets are full of pottery shops, with local artists all producing and selling their work on site. There was a lot of beautiful work, but our already oversized backpacks prevented us from purchasing more than a couple of espresso cups.

The Nimes camping ground was most notable for its hydroslide, built in a quasi-castle style. Love hydroslides. Awesome. Sadly we had to say goodbye to F and R the following morning, after a wonderful and fun-filled week. We jumped on a train for Freiburg, Germany.