Road trip north

Well, we’re on the road again (isn’t there a song about that??). We are evolving a pattern of choosing one area in which to spend an extended time just about every month. October was Paris; November the Languedoc; December is Colmar; January will be Tuscany, and February will be Barcelona (now you know the plan, come join us!!) In between each of these destinations, we take a road trip where we spend a few days in several  places along the way, sometimes scouting them out for future long stays and sometimes just using them as a stop-over.

So now we’re on our way to Colmar, and our first stop was Arles, an ancient Roman city in Provence where Van Gogh produced the bulk of his work (187 paintings!) in only 2.5 years. Throughout the city, there are replicas of his works in the location they depict, and tourist shops sell postcards of his paintings. But when we visited the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, there was only ONE of his paintings on display! The rest of the museum was taken up by works of a single artist who was apparently inspired by Van Gogh, but it was hard to see the connection.


Our Airbnb hosts in Arles were the BEST!  The house was like a miniature of our old Patterson Park House – wine cellar in the basement (stocked with local wines!), well-equipped kitchen on the ground floor, bedroom on the second floor, and a bonus room with a wonderful terrace on the third floor.  We felt so at home that we’ve made plans to return there next October for several weeks.

In addition to the Van Gogh (?) Museum, we visited several monuments of note in Arles.  Probably the most impressive was the arena that dates from Roman times and still hosts bullfights (but in France, they don’t kill the bull; the razeteurs pluck ribbons from the bulls horns as their prize).

Our next sop was Lyon.  Our apartment here was TINY but functional.

We were in town for the last of the 3 nights of the Fête des Luminéres that happens around Dec 8 every year.  Because of the bombings in Paris last year, it was cancelled.  So this year it was even bigger than before. We met the couple seated next to us at dinner and learned, through them, that the Metro had been closed making it difficult to get to the site of the Fête.  They offered to drive us and bring us back, so how could we turn that down??  [I hope that we would be so gracious to some newcomer to our town…]

Lyon is set on the banks of the Saône and Rhône Rivers and its neighborhoods rise high on all sides.  A number are reached most easily by funicular and our apartment in Croix Rousse was thousands of stairs above the center city (easy enough to descend, but you really wanted a Metro to take you back!). Even the walking street was named “Montée!”


We also visited the awesome Basilica Nôtre Dame de Forvière.  Pictures couldn’t capture the beauty of this church!

Lyon is a very foodie town, but we were there such a short time that we opted to save our food experience for the drive from Lyon to Beaune.  Guy Lassausaie is a Michelin 2 star about 30 minutes north of Lyon AND they are open on Monday!  We made a reservation for lunch and had a fabulous meal with impeccable service.

Our final stop was in Beaune, in the heart of Burgundy. Out gîte was a compact but functional space in ground floor of centuries old home about .25 miles outside the Beaune ring road – too far for walking in the bitter cold weather.

Fortunately, Beaune has numerous free carparks around its periphery.  We spent some time searching for the TI and finally found it right across from the Hôtel Dieu staffed by a lovely and helpful young lady. With her help, we 0ver-scheduled ourselves for the day and a half we had for touring.  We visited the only remaining mustard factory in the region (a great tour where the guide accommodated us in English even thought tour was technically in French, the Hospices de Beaune, and a tour of the cellars at Bouchard Aîné et Fils.

Next stop is Colmar.  We’re ready for cold weather because we’ve had a fair amount of it in Lyon & Beaune, and we’re really ready for Christmas.  Colmar should provide both.