- Avignon
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France
Take advantage of the bus trips from the Avignon coach company Lieutaud, who will take you on day outings to the Camargue, the Luberon, Chateauneuf du Pape and the Pont du Gard.
Take care though. We were carried away by the Pont du Gard and walked right across the valley to photograph the viaduct from above. We well and truly had red faces when the driver had to come to find us. We hadn't been paying sufficient attention to our French listening and thought we had an hour for the stop, rather than the half hour that the driver had requested.
I think we understood the odd "les Anglais," though, as we re-entered the coach!
Take the earliest train that you can and pack a bottle of champagne, sandwiches and cakes for the journey. Drink the champagne after the Tunnel and before Paris and then sleep for an hour before you hit the Rhone Valley.
Remember you arrive at Avignon Central, not the TGV station so don’t try to hire a car from the wrong place. The Grand Hotel by the station is fine and the walk through the city gates and up to the Palace is easy and interesting. The café on Rue Saint Michel at the corner of Rue Paul Manivet opens early on Sundays and has the best coffee. Enjoy!
Worth going for the TGV station alone - architecture on speed!
Look out for TGV trains with idTGV carriages. These privately-owned carriages attached to normal TGV trains offer you a choice of travelling in ZEN or LIVELY style.
For those who want to relax, choose the Zen carriages, no noise and not too bright. For the funkier at heart, choose the idZap carriages, where you can play games, rent videos or even go and listen to the live DJ in the bar. And if you book early enough you can travel first class for as little as 49€!
Once you’ve arrived refreshed from your rail journey, don’t rush away too quickly from Avignon Station. Do take time to appreciate this innovative building completed in 2001.
A curved façade and wall of overlapping laminated glass panels has been used by the architect to impressive effect. Look upwards to fully appreciate the scale of it all.
On your return journey ticketed passengers are allocated platform space nearest their booked train seat in order to reduce the usual rush when a train pulls in. Avignon is just one of four new stations between Paris and Marseilles commissioned in 1998.
Forget about dancing on the bridge, wrap a bike in a plastic bag, pop it on the train and cycle out from the station to your destination.
Eurostar from Waterloo to Avignon must be one of the best kept travel secrets. It is so fast and so easy and you arrive after 6/7 hours with your luggage and your temper intact. Try it!
That high-pitched noise you keep hearing everywhere as you get off the train isn't something wrong with your mobile phone, it's the cicadas!
On Wagon Lits service avoid the couchette and book a 3 person cabin. This will easily suffice a family of 4, as the 2nd child can sleep in the luggage rack. Greater privacy and as comfortable as the beds. (yes, that says little about the bed comfort, but.......)
Follow the trucks into the walled city. They have a very clever way around the massively confusing one-way system.
When booking car hire make sure you specify which Avignon station you are alighting from. There are two stations in Avignon - Avignon TGV and Avignon Sud. Confusingly, some TGVs stop at both and it's a long wait for a bus or an expensive taxi ride if you get the wrong one (coupled with an over-tired and hungry family left fuming at the station). I strongly recommend you get the right one!
Provence has a mystique to it that can be overshadowed by difficulties in getting there and getting around.
Getting there? The best two ways are by train and plane.
The SCNF TGV fast train leaves Paris for Lyon, Orange, Avignon and Aix, places that can be stop-offs to access Provence. They also have car hire places.
Plane arrival means going to Nice and getting car hire there.
Getting around Provence is best done by car. You have access at your leisure to the tourist towns (Gordes, Menerbes etc), trips to all the local town markets (recommended) or you can go further afield to The Camargue or Marseille.
On a bike you can take in the scenery and easily stop whenever you want. Also you can hear and smell the countryside that you miss if you are sealed in a car.
Burning all that energy in the day gives you a hearty appetite for the local food on offer in the evenings.
We're heading to Avignon to cycle around Provence by taking the Eurostar to Lille, with a TGV connection.
However, Eurostar seem to make it nearly impossible for passengers to take their own bikes (unless they are folding bikes they have to go as “freight” and arrive a day later), so we will be hiring bikes in France.
I think that Eurostar are missing a marketing opportunity here. How about introducing some special “bike” trains that take bicycles (like the bicycle compartments on Virgin’s trains)?
Such a service wouldn’t only appeal to British cyclists travelling to Europe but also to European cyclists wanting to take advantage of the excellent Sustrans network.
There are several companies that sell this type of holiday but they are quite pricey. It's quite easy, and a lot of fun, to plan it all yourself.
To start with you need a good map. Mark out a route that takes in scenic areas (green routes on the Michelin maps) and interesting towns and villages. Mark the towns that look likely overnight stops (we normally aim to cover 30-60km a day). Then get on the internet and search for hotels at your intended overnight stops. Its quite likely that you may need to modify your route once you find out where the good hotels are. You can book some hotels online but others you will need to phone. This is when it starts to get interesting if your French or Spanish is limited. Don’t panic, its really only the first night of the trip that you really need to be completely certain about. If you have any doubts about your booking for any of the other nights you can always ask the receptionist at one of the earlier hotels to phone and check the booking at a later hotel.
We had a great cycling holiday in Brittany, taking our bikes on the train to Plymouth, ferry to Roscoff then 10 days cycling around the Brittany coast, mainly on small lanes.
Even better, we tried the Plymouth-Santander ferry and cycled around Cantabria, Asturias and the Picos de Europa. Here we stayed in some beautiful Paradors, followed parts of the pilgrim route to Santiago (Camino St Jacques) and cycled along a “Via Verde”.
www.brittany-ferries.com
www.logis-de-france.fr
www.parador.es/english/index.jsp
www.viasverdes.com
www.feve.es/00/index.html
If you're in Avignon with a car, go to the free park and ride on the Ile Piot. The buses drop you by one of the main city gates and run every 10 mins or so.
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