Provence on the TGV

Saturday 7th June 2014

Blog post by the mother

We packed up and said "Au revoir" to our lovely apartment in Paris this morning.  Rather than take the metro we decided to take a taxi to the Gare de Lyon.  This proved to be a wise move because a) it started to rain and b) the Queen was in town for D-Day celebrations and this had impacted on some of the public transport.  We arrived at the Gare de Lyon in good time and managed to find Grande Maman and Le Trottin amongst the crowd before we boarded the TGV for Avignon.  Once the train got up to speed on the outskirts of Paris it was hard to believe that we were travelling at 320km/hr.  The kids filled in the time by reading, eating, playing on their technology and popping upstairs (yes, it was a double decker train) to visit with les amis.

Two and half hours later we arrived at the Avignon TGV station and to the heat.  Whew!  The light is amazing and so was the 34 degree temperature.  After sorting out our rental car (a Mercedes Viano that has already been fairly well travelled) we needed to have some lunch and regroup before heading off to St Remy-en-Provence.

The navigator lady and the father did a good job of getting us to the Intermarche supermarket on the outskirts of St Remy so that we could stock up for the week.  I remembered to stay on the right hand side of the road and we made it safely to Mas Aurelia our home for the week.  As soon as the bedrooms were allocated the kids were in the pool and enjoying cooling off after the journey.

We enjoyed a late dinner out in the garden and then relaxed for the evening.  Formidable!