Carol’s smile had that special illumination that appears whenever she is walking along a beach. I noticed it first when we walked the Pacific beaches near our new home in southern California. And it was out in force here along the French Riviera, where for me my beaming grin came from how the citizens of Nice handle the sand.

   Carol and I have been traveling together for two weeks now, and we’ve been having as wonderful a time as I’d expected. It’s when I think that everything is going great that I normally start to worry that something is about to reveal itself as terribly wrong. Carol calls it Reid being Reid.

   “I’m having a wonderful time,” Carol said to me, as we waited for our train to Nice. “I love these train rides.”

 I have reacted to bananas going from ripe to rotten in just a couple of days within a bowl of fruit, so I felt I had a pretty good emotional feel for the painter Paul Cezanne’s better-known subjects even before Carol and I arrived in Aix-en-Provence.

   The apartment here in Avignon was perfect: A spacious bedroom/dining area, adequate shower and functional kitchen. There were even enough outlets for our chargers. The complex itself was gated, with an inexpensive laundry and key entry for both the building and the apartment where we’d call home for the next six days. There were three grocery stores, well stocked with vins du pays within a minute’s walk. And one featured everything we’d need for dinners at home. The only luxury we lacked was a private patio. Since we were on the ground floor, Carol and I simply set about the task of creating one.

  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.)