Although I am with a new Road Scholar group – currently spending a week in beautiful Aix-en-Provence – I feel it’s equally important to update you about housekeeping/hygiene/laundry/grieving at the 35-day mark on this trip. So we’ll start there.
First – above is the bathroom at a small cafe, presenting the single-best tweezing opportunity of my entire life at a time when my luggage was back at the hotel. (Travel tip: there is no harm in having a pair of tweezers in your pocket if you’re strolling around the main square of Marseille and might need to use the toilet).
I’m in the same hotel for the entire week and it’s provided me with a chance to really unpack. The Adagio hotels offer tiny dorm-room size apartments and I love mine!
More importantly, there is a washer and actual dryer (rare find!) – and so here is my clothing, finally clean again:
In every relationship, there is one person in charge of mopping and one person not in charge of mopping. In my life with Ron, mopping never crossed my mind.
He was a happy and avid mopper. In recent years, as I had to take this task over, I spent quite awhile one day – looking around our house for where he kept the mop – and I could not find it anywhere.
There is a certain level of (much deserved) shame in having to go ask your partner – 21 years into a relationship – where the mop might be. (In my defense: Ron stored the mop outside – on the patio! How could I have known?!?!)
But I share the mop story so that the next picture makes more sense. In addition to being our favorite mopper, Ron was also the household ironing guru. I felt about ironing like I felt about mopping – extremely unconcerned.
But Ron ironed every Sunday – standing in the living room, with the CD player shuffling his CDs, a golf tournament muted on the TV. I’d sit on the floor by the ironing board, chatting with him. I loved the smell of the hot iron, asking him golf questions, insulting his taste in music.
Once my clothing was clean here at the Adagio, I put on some music and ironed every single shirt in my suitcase. It was some sort of grief-driven wrinkle obliteration activity that I imagine is fairly common in that Five Stages of Grief you’ve all recommended to me. Next up is mopping, I suppose.
We spent our day touring around cities near Aix. Road Scholar had this fantastic boating trip planned for us. We drove to a small village called Cassis:
Cassis is the gateway to Calanques National Park – the 10th national park in France. A calanque is a narrow, steep-walled inlet. These ones were formed 120 million years ago, which is good – it seems like they have some lasting power – so it’s likely they’ll still be around if I ever get back to southern France since I didn’t actually get to see them. .
It was too windy and too rainy for boats to cruise today and so here are some random Internet calanque pictures that I’ve put together for all of us to enjoy while we wish I had seen this incredible place in person:
Instead of my gorgeous marine landscape photos, I can share these almost-as-good pics. This is a car I encountered just down the street from the eyebrow tweezing restaurant in Marseille. It’s a Citroen electric Ami – and I liked it because it’s so small – it’s 8 feet long and 4 and a half feet wide. It’s the perfect car for tiny European streets…it would be hard to run into things in a car this small – but no matter – someone really committed to poor driving has dinged and dented and taped this thing to pieces. It’s got a maximum range of 46 miles.
My next not-a-calanque travel offering is this outdoor washer and dryer, around the corner from our hotel:
Here is a tall cow with oil cans for feet, which was near the tweezing opportunity and the highly-damaged electric car in Marseille:
Marseille was one of those cities I didn’t click with – I’m sure it didn’t help that the weather was so poor – but I’m glad to be able to give you a feel for the city’s art, vehicles, and hygiene. I can also show you this nice skyline picture, but now that we’ve all discovered the calanques together, I just don’t think we care:
The Adagio has a really low-key lobby, with tables and other hotel guests hanging out, having take out/picnic dinners together. Tonight, I had dinner there with my friends Tammy and Tim, who have joined this Road Scholar tour with me – touring is way more fun with friends!
I want to show you our dinners. This is the Tammy and Tim dinner – two entire people who went to the grocery store with me to acquire a reasonable and very French dinner for themselves:
And here is what I felt I – one person, maybe 5 foot 3 – needed for dinner – a pound of peanut butter, an 18-inch baguette, two 8-ounce packages of cheese, a pound of assorted fruit, a four pack of lemon yogurt, and a lemonade.
Final thought: we’re here to enjoy Aix-en-Provence, a city of 150,000, super famous for an artist named Paul Cezanne, who I don’t know much about yet. Stay tuned – but the city is lovely:
Here’s one more picture of me and Tammy in Cassis – we’re mere feet away from the boats that (could have) sailed us out to the calanques and – art note: I am pretty sure this orange statue has nothing to do with Paul Cezanne.
Travels with Valerie 