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From France to Spain

January 15, 2002

Dear Friends and Families,

Our Avignon stay was very nice but now it's time to move on to a new country, a new town, and a new home. The goal of the day was Cadaques on the northern coast of Spain, the Costa Brava or "wild coast".

We left Avignon on the road to Arles, where we'd try a brief stop to see one more Roman ruin. The road from Avignon to Arles is neither large nor small, not a freeway, but not a village backroad either. I had the sense that people had been driving this way for a long time. I suppose it has been happening for a couple thousand years, since the Roman outposts at Avignon and Arles were waypoints on the road from Rome into Spain. So our route is indeed well-traveled.

Along the road, Marianne saw a worn sign advertising a perfume museum. That sounded like a nice way to start a day's tour, so we turned off and wound through fields to find a stylish old building, surrounded with old copper stills. Inside, the docent apologized for not speaking English and simply motioned for us to look around. We looked and read what little we could. It was interesting. I felt like we were in an alchemist's laboratory and that may be the purpose of perfume after all, to turn a common person into precious one.

This factory had been producing perfumes from the plants of the surrounding fields for at least a hundred years, maybe much longer. In the past, they had produced medicinal remedies as well, elixirs and potions for the vague diagnoses of a hundred years ago. Today they offered modern advice on "aroma therapy" in much the same vein. Who's to say the old elixirs were not the right answers?

We had debated a stay at Arles because it has a number of Roman sites as well as an art history dating back at least to Vincent Van Gogh. Remember that old song: "I Left My Ear in Arles."? Probably not. Anyway, we decided to just get in one Arles sight before we headed to the warmer climes of Spain.

We chose the Coliseum for our history lesson. Walking into the inside, it's clear that it is still used, although the top tier of seats have long been gone. Incidentally, we learned that this top tier was called "the attic"; hence, the English word for the floor of a house under the eves. In its original form, the Arles coliseum had seating for 17,000 sports fans - fans of whatever sport was currently popular.

From the attic-level tower, there is a view of the city and the Rhone behind it. Overall, the structure is in remarkable shape due to the durability of the local stone and the quality of Roman engineering. It was easy to imagine the seats filled over the last two millennia for everything from gladiator fights to rock concerts. Now we could move on, having seen our history lesson for the day.

The expressway that leaves France and enters Spain squeezes between the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean Sea. The snow-capped mountains in the distance reminded us of California mountains. Now we were really headed into Spain.

The border crossing was like most European border crossings - hard to notice. The welcome sign helped. This and other road signs now changed from French to Catalan or to a mixture of Catalan and Spanish. Our Guidebook says Catalan is close to the Provincial version of French, so it's a bit of a bridge between France and "regular" Spain. Maybe there will be yet another hard-to-notice border crossing south of Barcelona when we leave Catalonia.

We took the third expressway exit after the border and headed for the coast. One of our guidebooks had recommended the coastal town of Cadaques as a more peaceful than normal coastal town. Its quiet is enforced by 20 kilometers of twisting two-lane road over hills that are the remnants of the Pyrannes as they reach the sea.

The guidebook was right. The road was long, narrow, twisty and discouraging to a casual visitor. But in the end, we spotted our new hometown and knew we'd made a good decision. But, that's the next story.

Take care. Stay healthy. Watch for borders.

John and Marianne

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Created Janaury 25, 2002

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