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boarding a boat in Avignon
Saturday, October 22 2016
Hotel La Pérouse, Nice, France
This morning before packing up our room, we walked around the sprawling hotel for one last look together. We snapped some pictures at the best overlooks, marveled at the concertina wire designed to thwart trespassers from Parc de la Colline du Château, and snickered at the woman who had been working out and was now taking an elevator to go to an adjacent floor.
After checking out of the hotel, we walked along the sea for awhile. We turned northward away from the sea near a still-makeshift memorial for those killed by a terrorist vehicular run-down attack that happened in Nice back on Bastille Day, and made our way to the Nice train station. We'd been told to meet there in front of a café called Paul for the woman who would lead us on our journey to catch our Vegan Travel boat in Avignon. Vegan Travel is a newish vegan cruise ship company Gretchen's parents discovered (they took one of their cruises on the Rhine), and Gretchen had signed us up for this vacation many months ago, well before I took my present job. Before we encountered our fellow vegans in front of Paul, we went inside and bought some bread and a cup of coffee for me. It would be our only food before getting on that boat in Avignon. Fortunately, the bread was very good even if the vegan options in Paul weren't any better than they would've been at the many brasseries we'd passed. We ate large hunks of that bread while the wiry older woman we'd assembled to meet figured out who was who. For whatever reason, there wasn't a train ticket for us, but two people hadn't shown up, so the wiry woman could give us their tickets instead. We boarded the train for Avignon and, wow, French trains fucking haul ass! We were apparently on one of their many TGV routes. It carried us southwestward mostly along the Mediterranean, past small villages and mountain ranges. Eventually our train left the sea and headed due west inland for Avignon. Somewhere along the way, the train became more crowded and we were forced to go to our assigned seats, which was just as well given the disgusting wet cough of the older gentleman across the aisle.
After catching a connecting train across Avignon, our wiry leader led us (those with less luggage) on a walk across Avignon to the Rhone. Gretchen had realized she'd left her reading glasses in La Cigogne du Port so she was in the market for a set of replacements. To an extent, were flummoxed by the odd divisions of responsibilities in French shops. In the United States, there's a tendency towards large stores that cater to every need a across a wide range of the human experience. A drug store offers drugs, but it also offers toys, tools, camping equipment, stationary, reading glasses, and a certain amount of food. But there are no drug stores in France. Instead, there are pharmacies, all of which look the same behind the same bright green animated cross. Pharmacies only sell medical supplies, both prescription and over-the-counter, and their lack of branding suggest they are operated by the state (much like alcohol beverage control stores in Virginia). Pharmacies don't even sell reading glasses, and at this point it wasn't clear where one would go to buy them. Our wiry leader told us that the place to get glasses was at an optician shop, and sure enough there was one along our walk. Nobody spoke much English in there, but Gretchen soldiered on with what she remembered of her French, accidentally using lots of Spanish along the way. What Gretchen was actually doing wasn't very different from what one would do when buying reading glasses off the rack in an American drug store, although in this shop there was a lot more personal attention. By the end there, Gretchen had turned the experience into an opportunity to learn more French. I finally had to poke my head in there to tell her that our guide needed to get going and we didn't have time for a language lesson.
Eventually our wiry leader led us to the banks of the Rhone, near the semi-ruined Pont d'Avignon (about which there is, according to Gretchen, a famous ditty). As navigable rivers go, the Rhone seemed small to me. At a little over 600 feet across, it was nowhere near as wide as the Hudson; it was only maybe twice as wide as the lower stretch of Rondout Creek. And yet our boat would be chugging upstream on this river for a most of a week. From what Gretchen had told me, our boat would be a monster, with over a hundred passengers and a track long enough on its roof for people to jog on. How was that going to fit on this little river? But then I saw our boat, the Scenic Sapphire. It looked like a long, low two-or-three storey apartment building on the water. It looked so much like a normal box-shaped building that the parts of it adapted to dealing with the river weren't immediately apparent. It was huge, 443 feet long, though it was only about 38 feet wide. Such a ship would have trouble finding places in the river wide enough to turn around. And though it was low-slung, I could see it having trouble getting under the bridges, few of which seemed to have been designed with boat clearance in mind.
Immediately inside the Scenic Sapphire was a marble-tiled entranceway, and a reception desk. Then, towards the bow, was a massive lounge full of couches, comfortable chairs, and a fully-stocked bar that would be free for our use for the duration of the voyage. Our group from Nice (which was just a small subset of the passengers) dissolved into the crowd of others already there. Linguine with red sauce was being served in the lounge, and of course I had a glass of red wine with that. As Chris, a zeal-of-the-convert vegan cabinetmaker from Long Island put it, "it tastes just like Chef Boyardee." Eventually Gretchen and I were led back to our room, which was on the highest of the residential decks. The boat was so impossibly long that the hallway to our room resembled some sort of Kubrickian joke. I kept expecting to walk into a mirror at its end. But no, it just kept going and going. Ours was room 326 and came complete with its own private balcony featuring an electrically-operated glass window. It was a beautiful little room with a huge bed, a shower-equipped bathroom, and its own enormous-screen teevee that turned out to also be an internet-connected Macintosh computer. I just wanted to hang out in there, so I busted out my laptop and stretched out on the bed while Gretchen explored Avignon, learning all about that time when the papacy gave up on Rome and relocated its office to Avignon for a number of popes (and a few antipopes as well).
The passengers were all given a safety briefing before dinner. We were shown a short video showcasing the many things we weren't supposed to do, such as throw trash into the river, kindle open flames, and put clothes on the lamps. All these bad behaviors were depicted by a smiling romantic couple depicted in the course of a onboard courtship that culminated with her taking off her top and flinging it onto a lamp (presumably to make for better mood lighting). Additionally, we were told to keep our arms and heads in the boat as we pass through locks, where clearances tend to be low.
Vegan Travel is a German company, and a good number of people on the boat were German-speaking. Though we would spending all of our time in France, the boat had only two official languages: German and English. (The boat's internet seemed to think we were in Germany; it kept offering me google.de instead of google.com.)
The dining room was another huge room in the bow of the ship, one deck down from the lounge. On this our first night we had dinner with two German couples: a gay couple from Frankfurt and an older couple from Bavaria. The dinner was all very multi-course and fancy, reminding Gretchen and me that, in typical American fashion, we never really learned the rules about how to properly use a knife and fork (lessons that appear to have been taught to our new German friends). The main course tonight was dumplings, which meant that nearly all of our food intake today had come in the form of carbohydrates.
Later Gretchen and I socialized for a long time with Nathan and Christina, a nice youngish straight-edge couple from Salt Lake City. He a bicycle reseller and she's a pharmacist. They'd come to veganism through his involvement in the straight-edge/hardcore scene, and they both had an interest in France as part of their love of bicycling (and the Tour de France). Nathan had grown up in a Mormon household in Pennsylvania, and that was probably why they were now in Salt Lake City, though he's not a Mormon now. (I would imagine that getting into straight-edge/hardcore would be a straightforward form of rebellion for a Mormon youth.)
At some point during the conversation, as my eyes glazed over during a discussion of food-preparation procedures, our boat (which had set sail earlier) went through its first lock of the voyage. We would actually be heading downstream for a couple cities before heading upstream again, but it still took me a bit by surprise when the boat began descending in the lock. The speed was surprisingly fast, a foot every five seconds or so. That reflects an enormous current of water draining out of the lock.
 The Nice shoreline viewed from one of the higher terraces of our hotel. The terrorist mow-down incident happened on the roadway visible adjacent to the beach (which is comprised of rounded stones, not sand).
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The Nice shoreline viewed from one of the higher terraces of our hotel. The terrorist mow-down incident happened on the roadway visible adjacent to the beach (which is comprised of rounded stones, not sand).