About the only thing that can get me out of bed at seven in the morning occurs in France. It’s the time when the bakeries open, and fresh, just-out-of-the-oven baguettes are available. So fresh and hot are they that there will be a burn mark across the fleshy part of your arm from carrying it back home. Iove that burn mark; it’s badge of honor, a mark of good taste. A baguette tattoo.

  I’d begun reading the late Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence and the sequel Toujours Provence aloud to Carol, generally as preparation for our trip to France but specifically  for our stopover in Avignon. While his depictions of the region would differ from our own during the week we spent there, one in particular was spot on.

My eVest has given me the kind of security only a true neurotic could love. Like B.C. and A.D. once upon a time, I could rename this era for me as B.e (Before eVest) and A.e.(After eVest), such as 2017 B.e and 2018 A.e.

   In 2017 B.e. I traveled through France without an eVest. My days of travel were spent checking and rechecking pants and shirt pockets, constantly padding them down to make sure all my vital items (passport, credit cards, cash, phone, granola bars) were all still safely on my person from my last check five minutes previously. From a distance, the sight of me sauntering down the streets of Europe must have looked like someone using his body like a set of bongo drums.

We’re at Day Eight of our maiden companion travel adventure, and if what was going to happen in the weeks ahead had happened already, Carol and I might already be re-thinking train travel in Europe. Instead, our first week has been an effortless glide through a Looking Glass of visual beauty of landscape and architecture, as well as an enriching tour of culture and history surpassing anything endured in World History 101. Then, there’s the laughter, which is turning out to be its own category of travel experience.
   Like our first night in Arles.

Turns out I’ve made two trips now to Arles for the same reason Vincent Van Gogh did, which is to say it’s an inexplicable one. In their sweeping biography of the self-tortured artist, Van Gogh : The Life, authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith tried to noodle out why Van Gogh bolted Paris for Arles. “If he had come to the legendary South of France in search of warmer weather, surely he would have stayed on the train and continued farther south…Instead, he stepped off into snow deep enough to cover his shoes, and trudged through the coldest winter in Arles in a decade… If he had come looking for the “brilliant Midi light” promised by Lautrec and Signac, he wouldn’t have picked as the subject of his first painting a butcher shop on an Arles side street—a sunless, skyless urban vignette that he could have found anywhere in Montmartre. If he had come just for the women…he would have moved on to Marseille…where women of every kind were always available.”

If logistics was fine art, I could see cutting off an ear in frustration. I knew, for instance, that our arrival in Arles would not leave us in walking distance to the hotel. That was of some relief to Carol, who’d already had enough of rues and cours that looked like scenes from The Battle of Algiers. (I’ve come across some streets on the Left Bank in Paris that exist only in black and white.)

   I learned nothing about what the wineries of Bordeaux were  famous for on my first trip to this city a year ago. I did learn something about where the wine was served, though, and it was in that same cafe that Carol and I sat now.

At least now I understand what’s wrong with my sense of direction. Carol and I arrived back in a section of Paris (the St. Lazare train station) neither of us had been to before. The Place d’Opera looked interesting, and I consulted our city map.

When Carol awoke Friday morning, I’d already been up for awhile. A long while. Before her eyes were fully opened, I completed a data dump of my collected thinking during the night. “We should head over to the train station to activate our Eurail passes…reserve our seats for Bordeaux…buy our tickets to Giverny for Saturday…change your money…take the 13 metro to L’orangerie…then walk the Champs Elysee to the Arc de Triomphe…then figure out the metro to the Eiffel Tower…walk to Rue Cler for dinner…then go back to the room and bed.” I managed to get all that in before Carol sleepily responded, “I need coffee.” It was unclear if anything I’d said to her had registered. Later, while Carol showered, I spent some quality time fretting whether I’d gotten enough sleep myself to last through the day. Being a travel companion is still very much a work in progress, but I’m learning to slow down and smell whatever it is these flowers are.

The 9:00 a.m. Le Bus Direct to Gare Montparnasse Paris at night, via our hotel room   There is a bathroom in the room at the hotel. There was a wrinkle (I’d reserved a single room instead of a double), but the desk clerk had already corrected that by the time Carol and I arrived. […]