still on the way the marseille...

Still on Friday we drove through the city of Nime (the place where "De"nim was first created). More Roman ruins there...

On to the city of Arles.

More Roman ruins to see there...

...and the wonderful and colourful fabrics of Provence...
...and this pottery that I absolutely loved!

Amazing architecture and of course...

...old window shutters.

happy thanksgiving!

Last night was our annual Canadian Thanksgiving gathering here at BFA. It was a lot of hard work, especially for our hosts Len and Mary, but it was such a good time and the food was wonderful! We have so much for which to be thankful!

Nice apron, Len!

This year the tables were arranged in the shape of the letter "G".

I liked this creative bit of rearranging of the table decorations.

pont du gard

We had a full day last Friday, visiting several places on our way from Avignon to Marseille. An absolutely stunning place was the "Pont du Gard" - the Roman aqueduct/bridge over the River Gard.

It is still in amazing condition considering it may have been built as early as 19 BC.
This beautiful home sits right on the riverbank facing the bridge. I think would enjoy the view from this house!
The bridge was built with no mortar and the stones (some as heavy as 6 tons) were precisely cut to fit perfectly together. What an amazing engineering feat!
There was a serious flood in 1998, however, the bridge sustained very little damage. That in itself is incredible.

avignon

We spent a few hours in the beautiful old city of Avignon. For almost 70 years in the 1300s it was the seat of the Papacy instead of Rome.

The church is massive and cost 13 Euro to tour so we left that for another day!

The Pont d'Avignon was built between 1171 and 1185, with an original length of some 900 m (2950 ft), but it suffered frequent collapses during floods and had to be reconstructed several times. Over the centuries, it became increasingly perilous as arches collapsed and were replaced by rickety wooden sections.

The bridge was finally put out of use by a catastrophic flood in 1668, which swept away much of the structure. It was subsequently abandoned and no more attempts were made to repair it. Since then, its surviving arches have successively collapsed or been demolished, and only four of the initial 22 arches remain intact today.

Part of the wall around the old city.

bird house church steeples

We saw some very cool church steeples on our travels this past weekend. They are very popular in this region of France and I would have loved to have seen more. They were built this way to allow the strong winds to blow freely through them and also to allow the sound of the bells to carry far and wide.

orange

On Thursday at noon Howard and I zipped off for our summer holidays! We had 4 1/2 days ahead of us and we were going to make the most of them!

Our first stop after about 6 hours was in the small city of Orange, France. This is an incredibly beautiful place and we were sorry that we hadn't arrived when it was still light enough to see more. However, I did get a few pictures of some very ancient structures. Absolutely beautiful, I think!

And did you know that the first King of Holland came from this small city? Orange is the national colour of Holland. The Dutch football team plays in orange shirts and the Dutch Queen has an orange flag on top of her palace. The French city Orange is where the first Dutch King originally came from. Consequently, the Dutch royal family still is named House of Orange.