Day 17 - Road trip in the LBD

We left Nice and Cagnes Sur Mer today and headed west. We started out on the scenic route only to find ourselves up in the hills with roads so tortured that hairpin is too straight to describe them. Several hours in to a 2 1/2 hour drive we stopped for lunch in a village called St. Maximin la Sainte Baume. We watched the old men play boules and the kids play on the carousel before driving directly to the highspeed roadway. We'd had it with the quiet roads.

Arles, our destination, was a hangout for the Celts, the Romans, VIncent Van Gogh, and Jeanne Caiment, who lived to be 122 years old and 164 days--the longest living human on record. It's a lovely town, but the roads in the section where our hotel is located were built by the Romans who had much narrower vehicles than we're driving. It was a horrific scene with us pushing little kids and old people off the corners as we tried to turn. And whole families out walking had to scatter when we drove what pass for streets here. They're narrower than the hallways in my house, and traffic is two-ways. I was ready to abandon the car when we found a parking place. Not a very big parking place, but we shoe-horned that van in and left it for the night.

We're staying at the Hotel L'Amphitheatre in the old section of town. The ceilings are thirty feet high and the staircases are immence marble affairs. The rooms are surprisingly big considering the width of the streets below. The LBD withstood the terrors of the day paired with a linen printed scarf, a narrow belt, and skinny jeans.