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Tarascon castle
Sunday, October 23 2016
Off the east bank of the Rhone, Tarascon, France
Breakfast was down in the dining room, though (unlike dinner), it was served buffet-style. In addition to such vegan breakfast staples as tofu scramble were cold cuts of vegan meat and slices of some mysterious type of vegan cheese. There was also plenty of high-quality bread. While we ate these things, servers came around to pour us coffee. But this coffee wasn't as good as the coffee made by an automated machine up at the sternmost side of the lounge.
I was so enjoying the relaxed pace of life on the boat that I might well never have left had it been up to me. But Gretchen wanted to explore Tarascon, the town we'd docked at overnight. There was a castle and an old church to be explored, as well as a quaint old village made of the same beige stone everything else seems to be made from in the Mediterranean.
Our first destination was that castle, which was a short walk from the boat (though it had been hiding behind a clump of riverside trees). Suddenly there it was, a glorious castle, looking more like a Disneyesque caricature of a castle than an actual castle. We crossed the stone causeway to its interior courtyard (a causeway that had replaced an earlier drawbridge), marveling the whole time and the planning and craftsmanship that had gone into the masonry. How had that cut the stones so perfectly with early 15th-century technology? While most of the walls were simple and plain, there were places with elaborate arches meeting arches, and all the crenelations high above us were cantilevered out on corbels beyond the walls. There were also a number of windows, most of them still covered with the heavy iron grates that once held out marauders.
Even across the bridge and inside the courtyard, we were in a space against which people in the castle had prepared to do battle.
After paying our admission, we were loosed upon the grounds. Initially we explored a garden with a long raised fish pond containing goldfish (one of whom was in the end stages of a terrible bloating disease). But then we cross another bridge and entered the hear of the castle, which contained a small courtyard that wasn't faced by any defensive structures. Here, the tall walls contained a greater number of windows and even some gothic-style details (such as ribbed vaults, peaked arches, and even some carved busts inset in little alcoves). We ran across the straight edge couple Nathan & Christina down there at the bottom of the center of the castle, and we would occasionally encounter them as we toured the castle.
There was staff of any kind in the castle and we were free to roam about as we chose, which was great. But a clever arrangement of signs led us through without us really being aware of it. These signs told us that certain stairways were not to be entered, while others were open for business. Following these directions almost subconsciously, we climbed up through the castle, seeing the various rooms, stairwells, and alcoves, some of which were so similar (in terms of shape and decoration) to other places we'd been that we wondered if we'd somehow entered a three-dimensional möbius strip. In some places, stout timber celings held up masonry floors for rooms overhead. Occasionally there would be tiny slightly-cantilevered rooms with hole-containing benches obviously designed as latrines. Looking down through those holes, one would see the Rhone. Some rooms of the castle had once served somehow as prison cells, often for British sailors, and their walls were covered with graffiti depictions of boats, chessboards, and amazingly well-rendered letters spelling out names, places, and hoped-for release dates.
The barely-noticed cues leading us through our tour eventually dumped us out on the castle's roof, a solid stone surface that was slightly-arched and sloped so as to collect water in gutters inside the parapets to send it out through the grotesquely-carved gargoyles. Walking on that solid stone roof made me think unhappily of the 130 year old slate roof on our Downs Street rental property, which (according to the tenants in its attic apartment) developed a couple leaks during a very windy rain storm only a day or so into this vacation. Thanks Obama! Just inside the cantilevered crenelated parapet, I noticed that "floor" was a grid of stone with gaps between them, an arrangement called "machicolations." Some of the stones of the grid looked like they might not be long for this world, so I felt uncomfortable putting my weight on them. Why was this part of the floor left open? The only reason I could imagine was to allow defenders to pour boiling oil down upon marauders. The view from up there was spectacular of course, and France is so lousy with castles that there was actually another one on the other side of the Rhone (though it was older and in an evidently worse state or repair).
We briefly walked around Tarascon's church (just emptying from its Sunday service). The church had been dedicated to St. Martha, famous for slaying a taming a child-eating dragon soon after arriving from the Holy Land in the early years after Christ. (Sadly, the dragon was then supposedly killed by the angry townsfolk, who had perhaps been riled by a Donald Trump figure). From there, we walked back to the boat through the village, delighting along the way at a young woman with her cat and Alsatian-style dog in a balcony chatting with a couple of young men on the street below. They were having their adolescent French-language thing, but when we delighted at the sight of the animals, they went out of their way to include us.
The signs eventually led us back down out of the castle. We emerged out of doorways whose signs had said "do not enter," and our tour was complete.
Lunch was another buffet aboard the Scenic Sapphire, where we had lunch with another youngish couple, Andrew and Michelle. He was a software engineer for Google and she had some sort of vegan food business. They were based in Manhattan, though for some reason Gretchen didn't know them. They'd signed up for this afternoon's bus-based tour of Aix but had decided not to go, and they'd given Gretchen their tickets. Unlike everything else about this voyage, such tours were not free (or even cheap), and Gretchen hadn't bought any of them, so this was the sort of score of which my younger, broker self would've approved. But the bus tour ended up being a bit of a fiasco; the people who'd planned it hadn't known that the bus ride to Aix would take well over an hour, meaning our time in Aix could only be about an hour. The ride eastward from Tarascon to Aix passed through what looked like a series of Cézanne paintings, which made sense given that Cézanne was born in Aix and some of his paintings had been of these very landscapes.
Once the bus dumped us on the streets of Aix, our wiry leader (the woman who had led us through Avignon), hurried us towards the cathedral, dismayed that she only had an hour to show us the city. We passed at least one fountain that looked to be nothing much more than a moss-covered boulder. Later we passed a throng of college students dressed up as various characters marching and shouting things as if in protest. But no, it was some sort of collegiate initiation rite.
There was that courtyard with the building having an ancient animatronic display of the seasons. And then there was that rumpled ancient courtyard where the lawyers all work. As for the cathedral, it was glorious, but aren't they all? By this point, I was needing to piss, and an additional problem with this side-tour was that no thought had been given to biological needs. There were no bathrooms anywhere we went. And while Gretchen was fascinated by the draft-dodging story of one of the older people on the tour, I was starting to wonder if my bladder was going to survive, and I really didn't want to know about how drafts had been avoided more than 50 years ago. I mentioned this bathroom issue to our wiry guide, pitching it as yet another fuckup from the people who had only allotted us an hour to walk through Aix, though I don't know if she took it that way.
Fortunately the bus itself had a bathroom, though the driver tended to keep it locked and was reluctant to unlock it. It was somehow tucked underneath the rest of the bus near the entrance at its middle. Pissing into that thing came as such sweet relief. And then as I sat next to Gretchen I wondered if my attitude for this trip had already spoiled. We hadn't even started heading up the river yet!
Things were better by dinner time. We sat with our new friends, the Google guy and his vegan wife. As with our new straight-edge friends from Salt Lake City, they don't drink. Gretchen intercepted some desserts that had been drizzled with champagne so as to keep them on their program.
The Tarascon castle, viewed from the east. Click to enlarge.
Me in the courtyard inside the castle proper.
Me seated upon a latrine cantilevered slightly over the Rhone.
Graffiti in the Tarascon castle. Click to enlarge.
Beautiful prisoner graffiti in the Tarascon castle. Click to enlarge.
Gretchen on the roof of the castle with the Rhone in the background. Note the gargoyle, corbels, parapets, crenelations, and machicolations. Click to enlarge.
Students being hazed in Aix.
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