More Roman Stuff! Road trip to Orange, Pont du Gard, and Nîmes

In Avignon, we are staying in an Air BNB just outside the city walls and walking a lot! It’s a joy to escape to our wisteria and jasmine graced deck out of the tourist areas. It’s also a joy to have discovered a local, suburbanish bakery with delightful treats, which we haven’t yet topped in any tourist area. It was important to have an outside get away in this stay and we do have that for sure! However, the walk is a bit more than bargained for and since we have a free parking spot here we decide to go on the road again. We drove to Orange, then Pont du Gard, and Nîmes, basically making a loop of no more than 30 minutes drive outside of Avignon. A much less stressful situation than the drive through Monaco. First stop, Orange, to see more Roman ruins. The town has a lovely Roman amphitheater and an opera house, although not much else that we deemed worthwhile enough for our tired feet.

The Pont du Gard is located within a park, it is one of the oldest, most intact Roman acquaducts still surviving. It was constructed in the first century AD to usher water from the mountains to the important city of Nîmes. It is massive, spanning the Gardon River. For every 350 feet, the acquaduct dropped one inch, carrying approximately nine million gallons of water per day to Nîmes. The bridge is within the park which is full of kayaking, biking and pedestrian trails. A place to spend a lovely afternoon picnicking and enjoying the outdoors, French style. The acquaduct itself is one of the most impressive feats of ancient Roman engineering we’ve seen, honestly, impressive is an understatement.

And then on to Nîmes, a clean, classy city, less touristy than most of the other areas in Provence which we’ve visited. We happened to be there during Journées des Romains. Garrisons of Roman guards patrolled the streets and camped out in the park. They guarded the ancient Temple of Diana (now thought to be a library) while children got a first hand glimpse of history.

We stayed the night in Nîmes, and so glad we did! It is a treasure. We climbed to the top of Tour Magne, 122 steps straight up, atop a hill leading from the Jardin de la Fontaine.The tower was originally a Celtic lookout dating from about 450 BC and then the Romans reinforcedWell worth the hike for the magnificent view of Nîmes, old town and new. By the way, Nîmes is the city where denim fabric was first made, hence the name, de Nîmes or from Nîmes. We saw the structure, Maison Carrée, which most inspired Thomas Jefferson’s architecture on the capital of Virginia as well as perhaps Monticello.

Back to Avignon and our Air BnB and some much needed rest. On Tuesday, April 29th we toured three towns in the Luberon region with a driver and a few other tourists. I will explore that in further detail in a future post as well as the Michelin star restaurant where we lunched in Avignon, yum!