Chapter 1: La Belle Londres
Sunday 6 July 2025
Hi folks!
It’s that time of year again. Another summer trip lies ahead of us, and I thought a few of you might like to spiritually join us for at least part of the trip. This year it’s a return to France, travelling mainly by train, as we head for a few days in the sun. There’s no World Cup, like back in 2023, so we might actually get to do some French stuff this time. It’s also a bit of a special trip, as we are taking my mum with us to celebrate her 80th birthday. And where better than the heat of the Cote-d-Azur?!?
Just like the real Tour de France, our own petit Tour de France has an English leg. To kick off our journey through the backbone of France, we spent two nights in London, mainly to get our breath back after a hectic last few months in Prague.
“Wait a minute – London’s not a great place to relax with the family, Rich”, I can hear you shouting at your Sunday morning screens. But I actually find it extremely relaxing. Even when I’m on a work trip, London is a great place to be.
We kicked things off with dinner on Thursday at the Ivy. This proved to be a great choice to start our trip, as the food and the cocktails were both fabulous – as good as most of the decent places in Prague and cheaper than many of them, these days. That’s inflation for you, I guess. To slightly correct myself (after checking the bill), the food is cheaper. I guess we can still thank our lucky stars that we don’t have CZK 600 cocktails in Prague yet, but I wouldn’t mind betting they’re not far off!
The next morning, it was the other end of the culinary scale, but a pleasant surprise nevertheless. Breakfast at the Premier Inn was a lot better than I expected it to be – black pudding, decent bacon, hash browns and a nice soft fried egg. It did start to go a bit awry when the fried breakfast guy couldn’t understand my accent, and brought me brown sausages instead of brown sauce. I was wondering why he’d said that brown sauce would take five minutes to prepare. For a moment, I thought this was going to be some funky home-made stuff. Ah, well.
There’s a lot of new buildings gone up since we lived here and you can now play the fun game of spotting which are the new ugly buildings and which are the old ugly buildings. Speaking of which, we walked through the Barbican on Friday. If ever there was an example of a brutalist fever dream, that is it. A concrete jungle rammed with tiny flats overlooking doomed water features, whilst the posh folks drink prosecco in a distant corner, during the interval of Bach’s Mass in D Minor played by the North Saxony radio symphony orchestra. It feels like being in a socialist experiment during the 1950s in the Soviet Union. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley would have been proud.
We’ve got a couple of nights here before catching the early-morning Eurostar to Paris. From there, it’s a rapid ride on the TGV down to Avignon, for a week in Provence, and then on to Cannes for a few nights on the Cote-d-Azur.
Let me know if you want to be kept up to date with our adventures. That’s half the fun of doing these things.
Anyway, the wifi is too sketchy to write more at this point in time, so I’ll sign off for now.
Catch up soon!
Cheers,
Rich
The Pride of London
Monday 7 July 2025
Morning all,
Before catching the early morning Eurostar to Paris, we had another couple of nights in London to enjoy.
As those of you with Facebook might have spotted, Oli and I went to the Lana del Rey concert at Wembley on Friday evening, and she gave it a glittering review as the “best concert ever”. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed it too, albeit I was one of about five people there who was not dressed in a short skirt and crop top.
There was a lot of eye-catching fashion on display all over London this weekend, as we managed to book our stay to coincide not just with Wimbledon and various major concerts, but also with London Pride. The march, not the beer, as I found out to my disappointment.
To get into the party spirit, the girls went to see Mamma Mia on Saturday night, with their cousins Lucy and Millie.
I opted for a play called Till the Stars Come Down, which was showing at the Haymarket, and which is an incredible piece of theatre. I strongly recommend you to see if you get a chance. On the face of it, it’s the story of a wedding between a working class lass from Mansfield to a Polish guy called Marek. But there are so many themes for our age woven into the texture of the piece that it is a really hard-hitting, gripping piece of theatre. It covers Brexit, the miners’ strike, societal breakdown in the UK over the last forty years, and the ups and downs of personal relationships. It does all this with a lot of humour and good spirit, but is heart-breaking at times. I feel privileged to have been able to see it.
During the day, we took advantage of the virtually free bus tours you can enjoy in London, as the double deckers give a really great view of parts of the city you’d miss if you only travelled by Tube. We toured through Camden Town and a lot of Farringdon, before jumping off at Covent Garden.
This seems to have been significantly improved by the congestion charge. Despite its knockers, it seems to have done an incredible job of keeping the bulk of the traffic out of the centre of London. The buses and taxis are still there, but there’s very few private cars. I’m starting to think it’s something they should consider doing in Prague. Frankly, I’m not sure I want to be the driving force (!) behind that, as it would need an extremely brave person to take on such a policy. But if the traffic in Prague continues to get worse, we’ll all be screwed to standstill anyway, so we need something to be done sooner rather than later!
One thing that is an interesting development is that there are lots of Czech developers and businessmen here these days. Maybe they can take some inspiration back to Prague, to try to sort things out.
Ah well. Having enjoyed our weekend in London, it was up at 5:45am for our Eurostar to Paris. We just about packed into an XL-Uber (which wasn’t particularly XL, but I guess that’s Uber for you!), and joined the huge queue for security check and passport control at 6:45am.
There was a surreal moment when my mum managed to get on the wrong side of the security desk, and found herself standing next to the security staff, rather than facing them. We rescued her pretty quickly, and after a medium-sized delay for the French police to work out what a passport is for, we were onto the concourse and shortly en-route to Paris.
So another week starts, and we’ve finally made it to France. Wish us all bon voyage, and we will write more soon!
Cheers,
Rich
Why Does it Always Rain on Me (in Paris)?
Tuesday 8 July 2025
Bon apres midi, mes amis!
Greetings from a typically wet Paris afternoon. At least, that’s always been my experience of Paris, from the first time I came here in my youth, to our pre-Christmas visit last year to show the girls how much fun the Eiffel Tower can be in a hurricane!
This time, it’s been mainly brief showers, but you still daren’t head out without an umbrella.
This last day has also brought the first close brush with peril! As we finished lunch yesterday afternoon, my iphone beeped, and I received the nicely blunt text message telling me that our train to Avignon had been cancelled.
That was it, cancelled. No options, no explanations, just cancelled.
This was slightly worrying, to say the least. We only had one more night booked in our Paris hotel, so a failure to get to Avignon was going to be expensive for a start. I ran back to the hotel and logged on to the SNCF website. Fortunately, there were still 5 places free in business class on the evening train today, so I booked them, closing my eyes when making the payment, to make it less painful. An hour later, all the trains were sold out. That was a close one!
Paris was a very enjoyable stopover. I am still amazed at the fact that you can get a decent breakfast in the centre of Paris for 7 Euros. The price of a basic coffee in most Prague cafes, these days. Whoever would have believed a few years ago that we would end up going from Prague to Paris for a cheap weekend?
Those of you with Instagram (which I think is about four of you, judging by the number of “likes” I’ve got) will have noticed that we made it out to Versailles on Sunday. I remember last going there about 30 years ago. The experience has drastically changed. The number of tourists was overwhelming, and brought home to us how over-tourism really is an unpleasant feature of modern life. We basically plonked ourselves in the middle of a throng at the entrance gate, and allowed ourselves to be swept through the corridors of Versailles, catching fleeting glimpses of a beautiful dining set here or a gigantic bed over there. The beds, by the way, must have been a joke. No-one needs that much space to sleep in, you’d get lost!
Unlike Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Versailles is no longer owned by the French monarch, as the last one lost his head in 1793 (Louis XVI, for those who are counting). The French revolution came about because of the rich hoarding all of the wealth, and poverty becoming rife across the nation. No-one could afford to buy a house, and the poor were reduced to eating cake (as Louis’ wife Marie Antoinette famously commented). How times change, eh?
As a point of interest, when Louis was executed, his 8-year old son became the presumptive King Louis XVII, a title he held for two years, all of them spent in prison. He died of mysterious circumstances, which were nothing to do with the hundreds of wounds found on his body when the autopsy was done.
The walls of Versailles are adorned with pretty boring pictures of historical VIPs, who look about as exciting as modern reality TV celebrities. It’s like a historical version of Hello or Grazie magazine. Inbreeding must have been rife in those days, as at least one family portrait had the husband and wife with the same noses. Of course, it is possible that the artists had a sense of humour, and were merely mocking their sneering “betters”. But who knows?
We were eventually swept into the Hall of Mirrors, where the crowd petered out a little. This is still an impressive room, and was the first part of the tour I actually enjoyed. These days, though, it would be better dubbed the Hall of Selfies.
Beyond the Hall of Mirrors were Napoleon’s apartments, where he’d had a picture of himself put up in every room, and each one was more self-aggrandising than the last. There’s Napoleon saving a child, who’s fallen into the lake. There he is being nice to dogs. There he is beating the Italians at war. And there he is winning the world Sudoku championship. The artists’ sarcasm must have gone into override here, as all the pictures looked absolutely ridiculous. It was almost like looking at Putin or Trump, such was the narcissism on display.
To get back to the tour, the gardens at Versailles really are beautiful, and this is worth the entrance fee, if only it were possible to avoid the earlier crowds. (If you want to see some of the pictures I took, check out my Instagram on richard.b.jones.39 and give it a “like”.) We spent a rain-soaked hour walking around them before getting back on the train.
We had a lovely dinner close to the Opera house yesterday evening. The food can be really fabulous in France. It took my mind back to our Christmas visit, when we’d treated the kids to a meal at the Moulin de la Galette. It had been fun to point to Manet’s picture in the Musee D’Orsay and say to the girls – “That’s where we’re going for dinner tonight.”
The sun is coming out again now, as I write, and we are heading shortly to the Gare de Lyon, so I’ll leave it there for now. No doubt the sun will now shine on Paris incessantly until I next visit, and the rain will come again. Ah well.
Speak soon, and hope you are all having a great start to the summer!
Rich
The Fires of France
Thursday 10 July 2025
The sense of adventure we felt a couple of days ago when our train to Avignon was cancelled was multiplied severalfold yesterday.
As you may recall, we managed to book ourselves on the evening train to Avignon, thanks to some last-minute scrabbling about by yours-truly.
We arrived at Gare de Lyon well on time, and had our traditional lunch at Pret-a-Manger. We were carrying two gigantic suitcases, so we needed to be first on to make sure we could fit them somewhere convenient. So the plan was for me to run through with them as quickly as possible, whilst Marta brought the remaining generations of the Jones family along behind.
There was of course nowhere to sit at the Gare de Lyon, so we sat on the stairs of the grand cafe, while waiting for our platform to appear. As soon as it did, I was off like a rocket. Then, as if by magic, my boarding pass wouldn’t work. I built up a queue of about fifty people before seeing someone rub their pass on the detector. I tried this, and it worked.
On to coach 11 I sped, running up the stairs with the suitcases rattling behind me, and just managed to bag two spots before the other passengers filled them up. A few minutes later, the girls appeared, and a few minutes later, we were off at 260 km per hour towards Provence.
One hour later, we were sitting comfortably in the middle of France, going nowhere. And that’s where we stayed for another hour. The thing is, climate change has caused a now common phenomenon called wild fires. And right now, there was a wild fire burning between Avignon and Marseille. Trains, unlike cars, find it difficult to drive around hazards. They can either go through them and hope for the best, or they can go in a different direction. And right now, our driver was trying to decide if he thought it was his lucky day or not.
Another half hour later, he decided it was probably not. We were going to go to Lyon instead, and could make our own way to Avignon once we got there. Well, it is only a 3-hour drive by car, I guess.
I asked my neighbour what time we would get to Lyon. “Around 8,” he said. I logged on to the SNCF website. There was a train at 8:10, which would take us to Nimes. That was close enough to the villa that we would still be able to make it tonight. But was 10 minutes enough in Lyon station? “Probably not,” my neighbour confirmed.
So we waited. We would see what time we got to Lyon and take it from there. In the worst case, we would book a hotel for the night and head on in the morning. Not ideal, but probably better than riding a train through a wild fire.
An hour later, around 7:30, the guard announced that we would shortly be entering Lyon station. Bugger, I thought. I should have booked the train. But I still had time. I booted up my computer, whilst everyone around was packing their bags ready to disembark, and checked the schedules again. There it was – a train direct to Nimes in 40 minutes, and they had 5 seats available. I booked it immediately, and packed my pc away quickly so we could disembark and make our way to our new train.
There was one more problem: we were due to pick up our hire car at Avignon station. Now I would have to come back for it in the morning. I decided to give them a call, to let them know.
“Oh, it’s good you called,” said the guy from Enterprise. “We were trying to contact you. Due to the fires, we are missing about twenty cars. So we would not be able to give you a car anyway if you arrived.”
“Oh, that’s good,” I thought, not really sure if that was good or not. “So will I get my money back?”
“Yes, you can apply for your money back.”
I was in too much of a rush to argue. Somehow, I would need to sort out another hire car, but that could wait for now. The immediate challenge was to spot our platform sufficiently early so that we could get our cases on the train again.
Lyon Part-Dieu station was busier than even the Gare de Lyon had been, back in Paris. It was a daunting task. We’d only have a few minutes to board, suitcases and all, as the train only stopped here on the way. At Paris, it had been much easier.
By 8pm, there was no sign of our train. It was now due at 8:20. I checked which platforms were already full, to give myself a bit of a fighting chance. K and L look good, I thought. And a few minutes later, platform K was confirmed. I made a sprint for it, and found that I had to choose between an escalator rammed with tourists of all ages, or a path which seemed to lead to the back of the train. I chose the escalator. Bad move. Once I got up, I saw that our coach was at the back of the train, and the foot path would have been a much better option. I eventually got to our coach, and stumbled on with the suitcases. Of course, this time there was no room at all for our luggage. How were we going to manage?
Fortunately, there were two very nice American gentlemen, who informed us that they had a spare seat, which would make a lovely place for our luggage. The other bag, we could put in the overhead compartment. It was going to be jutting out a bit, and if we did a tight corner, it might kill someone when it fell off the shelf, but it was a risk worth taking. The American gents were part of a growing band of refugees these days – people escaping the Trump regime. Or the “smart Americans”, as I like to call them. They had moved to Montpellier recently, and were a delight to talk to as the train left the platform.
We were on our way to Nimes at last!
Ninety minutes later, at Nimes station, we called for a taxi, and a one turned up pretty quickly. Somehow, he managed to squeeze all of us and our cases into a tiny vehicle, as we drove the 15 minutes to the villa, and to our waiting hosts. They were most pleased to see us at last, and welcomed us warmly, before helping us settle in and work out how all the mod-cons work in the villa.
If ever I’ve deserved a glass of wine, this is it. So I’ll drink to the rest of the trip, and to celebrate our successful arrival at Nimes.
Let’s hope those fires don’t get worse.
Speak soon,
Rich
When in Rome
Saturday 12 July 2025
After an adventurous start to the week, with our eventful journey from Paris to Provence, the last couple of days have been a bit more relaxing from our base on the outskirts of Nimes.
For those of you who’ve never been to Nimes, I can strongly recommend it. It is known as the French Rome, presumably thanks to the pickpockets, guys whistling at female tourists and disappointing football teams. But possibly thanks to some of the most wonderfully preserved Roman monuments outside of Italy.
It has a large colosseum, known as the Arena, where they hold pop concerts and the occasional bullfight. There is also a Greco-Roman temple in the centre of town, complete with its colonnades and Doric ach (whatever that is).
The Visigoths took over Nimes in the fifth century, so no doubt the Cure would have played a concert or two in the Arena around that time.
There is a nice buzz to Nimes. It feels more relaxed than some of the more popular tourist destinations, and has seven Michelin star restaurants. As my mum and kids are not particularly demanding in terms of haute cuisine, we decided they would probably be wasted on us this time around, and will save them for a successive visit.
Close to Nimes is the Pont du Gard, a magnificent feat of Roman engineering, the aqueduct which once took water from the springs of the local hills to the city, which at the time was one of the most important in the Roman empire. It is incredibly well-preserved, a three-tier wedding cake of a structure, with two tiers of large arches, and a top tier of smaller arches. It adorns postcards from here to the end of Provence, and like most things touristy in this country, the locals have done a fine job of making it an experience to remember, with a museum, some lovely scenic walks and a café serving great cakes and coffee.
From Pont du Gard, we drove through Orange and it’s amazing Roman theatre (where the Cure really did play, some years back). In Orange, Marta and I enjoyed a fantastic lunch at the restaurant L’Intemporel. It’s a one-man show, but if you visit Orange, you have to eat here, as he does a phenomenal job, and you’ll leave delighted by the quality of the food and the friendliness of the service.
Uzes was another gorgeous old town, with some fine Roman architecture, and should be much more famous than it is.
In retrospect, we crammed quite a bit into our first day in Provence. Could have really done with booking another week, if I’m honest. But I do need to work at some point in the next couple of weeks!
Good to hear that a lot of you are also planning to visit France in the coming weeks and months. It never fails to satisfy, in my experience, and we will definitely come back soon. In the meantime, we have a few more days in Provence ahead of us, before we head for a bit of sand and sun on the Cote d’Azur!
Anyway, it’s my turn to cook, so I’m off to put a couple of sardines on the grill, to go with the lovely tomato salad which Marta has made up.
Will share more soon!
Cheers,
Rich
Starry, Starry Night
Monday 14 July 2025
It’s not hard to imagine what made Vincent Van Gogh fall madly in love with Provence. He spent his last few years here, between Arles and St
Rémy, and it was here that he had his most productive period, completing around 200 paintings in under two years.
He sold one of them, and that was to a family friend. His genius remained unappreciated until after his passing, a bit like Frank Sidebottom. Tormented by mental demons that he could not control, he took it out on canvas after canvas, delivering a series of works that has never been bettered, in my humble opinion.
Provence itself feels like walking though a VR version of a Van Gogh exhibition. From the cypress and wheatfields, to the sunflowers craning their necks to get a better look at the sky, it is so colourful and bright, it feels like Van Gogh painted it just for you. The beautiful aromas of verbena, sage, rosemary, thyme and lavender provide a wonderful tonic for the senses.
My trusty travel companions have been enjoying a few days’ rest at the villa on the edge of Nimes, while Marta and I have been exploring the lavender fields and hills.
Things have not been without the odd hiccup. My mum panicked when her phone got down to 71% battery life! (At the same time, Oli was on 25%
and I was on 6%, so I guess it depends what you’re used to). The local cat (whom the girls have christened “John”) brought us a nice present of “un oiseau mort” yesterday morning to go with our breakfast. And we ran out of croissants at one point.
We did manage to visit some of the major attractions of Provence: Avignon, with its papal palace from the days when the papacy moved from Rome (and then back to Rome, apparently without telling the pope at Avignon so we ended up with two popes for about fifty years), and the fringe theatre festival, which happens every summer and turns the whole city into one big live show!
There were sculptures of two famous Czechs from history in the palace, as the empire had been led by Charles IV at the time of the Avignon papacy. Lali stood between the busts of Karel IV and the bishop of Prague jumping up and down and chanting “kdo neskace neni cech hop hop
hop” (who’s not jumping isn’t a real Czech!) which baffled some of the tour guides 🙂
The more I see mass tourism the more I fail to understand it. Most people ignore the guide and just walk around, staring at “stuff” with little or no context. They may as well be walking around Ikea, as far as I can tell. Maybe someone should build a fake historical town where we could entertain millions of tourists without posing a danger to real cultural relics!
Arles is far less overrun with tourists, and has a lovely feel to it. Set on the banks of the Rhone (autocomplete seems to think Arles is on the banks of the Rhine for some reason!), it has some wonderfully preserved Roman monuments including an Arena to rival that of Nimes and an ancient theatre, where the Greeks would have performed Mamma Mia back in the day.
There is a Van Gogh museum, where they only have one Van Gogh, but they manage to stretch it out somehow. It was accompanied by about
fifty paintings from Sigmar Polke.
There is also the famous Cafe du Forum (the yellow Cafe de nuit) from one of Vincent’s most famous paintings. Somewhere, there is also the famous bedroom with the rickety chair which Vincent painted in such delightful, Provençal colours, capturing the sunshine, the sounds, the aromas and the esprit of Provence better than anyone before or since.
We couldn’t have finished our time in Provence without at least one trip to a wine tasting. So we drove up to Chateuneuf de Pape. Finding myself in a red wine town, when I’m allergic to red wine, was maybe not the ideal choice, but we picked up a bottle of phenomenal white wine.
As we drink the last glass before our travels continue tomorrow, I raise a glass to all of you who are still with us on the tour. Thanks
for your kind comments and feedback. And the constructive criticism too 🙂
See you soon!
A bientot!
Rich
Where the Brass Bands Play Tiddly Om Pom Pom!
Wednesday 16 July 2025
As the tranquil notes of Provence fade into the distance, our journey finally takes us south to the French seaside. Or the “riviera”, as they prefer to call it.
A very early morning saw us checking out of our villa and heading for Nimes station, where another juggling act involving two cases and four female travelling companions found me slightly stressed on Platform B trying to find coach 11 for the 9:58 to Marseille St Charles. We eventually found it, and crammed on to the platform with the rest of the sardines before embarking on a 90-minute sprint to the coast.
The train to Marseille was the first one where we didn’t have pre booked tickets. So of course it was also the first one that was full… We eventually managed to squeeze in by putting our cases on top of a Jenga-style tower which would surely come tumbling down at some point on our way to the coast. The girls squeezed in four to a three-seater and I sat on one of the cases as we watched the wheat fields of Provence disappear into the distance and the azure hue of the Mediterranean coast drift slowly into view.
Mum must have particularly enjoyed the cote d azure express, as she tried to get off at pretty much every station on the route down.
We were supposed to have a stopover in Marseille for bouillabaisse for two hours, but when we got there, we still had a chance to catch the earlier train to Cannes, so we took it, thanks to another sprint across the concourse. So we arrived two hours early in Cannes, for the last stop on our trip.
I’ve only ever seen Cannes full of real estate folk trying to sell dodgy shopping centres in rural Romania. So it was a bit odd to see it in all its summer glory, replete with tourists and holidaymakers of all shapes and sizes. It was Bastille Day, the 14th of July, when the French celebrate the end of the monarchy, and taking back control. So it was absolutely packed, as well as being hot and humid.
However, it did still have the Cannes vibe, and it wasn’t long before we were into the swing of things, swigging Aperol Spritzes for 15 Euros a shot on the Croissette promenade.
As our first day in Cannes drew to a close, the fireworks show started down in the town, and we watched from our elevated viewpoint in Suquet.
So let’s see what Cannes has to offer…
Speak soon,
Rich
Back to Reality
Sunday 20 July 2025
All good things must come to an end, as a wise man or woman once said. And so, the sun sets on our 2025 summer trip.
On our last evening in Cannes, Marta and I went for dinner at Table 22, a very nice restaurant on the hill leading between our hotel and the port. Marta had the best steak of her life, and I had some fish so fresh that it wished me “bon appetit” before I tucked into it.
Mum and I were up at 6am the next morning, for a taxi at 6:30 to the station. From there it was to be a short journey to Nice Airport. All seemed to be going according to plan, until we got our cases to the gate of the hotel garden, where our taxi driver was waiting, smiling on the other side.
The only thing was, there was no way to get to the other side. The gate was locked shut, and there was nobody to be found at reception, despite us having been told they would be working from 6:30.
I couldn’t see us throwing the cases and ourselves over the gate, so we tried to think hard what to do. Aha – the key must open the gate – I thought, so had to wake poor Marticka up to bring us the room key. But of course, that didn’t work. Why would it be that easy? Still no-one at reception. Let’s try calling the hotel, there must be someone who can tell us the code for the gate.
I dialled the number. And got the answering machine. I could hear my own message coming out of it about five metres behind me. Sounding slightly more panicky with each sentence.
Eventually, the taxi driver came to the rescue. He simply broke the gate open, forcing it as hard as he could, so there was just enough room for me and my mum, and our three cases, to squeeze through.
We were finally in the taxi and on our way to the station.
At the station, we were half an hour early, so had a Paul’s breakfast while we waited. Then we found we were able to jump on the earlier train.
The Cote d’Azur express has a lovely route, past Juan de Pins and Antibes, with their beautiful sandy beaches. Then you arrive at shale-blessed Nice, with its crowds and twenty-first century conveniences. This was our stop, and a short shuttle ride later, we were at the airport.
We were again half an hour early, but to be fair, my mum had been ready for her flight at 7am the day before, so if anything, we’d slowed down a bit.
Once mum’s flight opened, she checked in her case, then headed through the gate to catch her flight to Luton. I headed into Nice, to wait for the girls to join me for our afternoon flight.
On the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, I finally started to melt. Dressed in long trousers and long sleeves, ready for the flight, was no way to endure temperatures never before experienced by mankind. The 30-foot tall palms did little to mitigate it, the shade they provided being mostly on the middle of the road. I walked around for an hour or so, just to see some old favourite sites like the Roman fountain and the Negresco Hotel, with its lovely Art-Nouveau features.
After enjoying a plate of oysters (does July have an “r” in it? I really don’t know, I’ve melted so much), I got on the train back to the airport, where my trusty companions would be waiting for me. Later that evening, we would be back in Prague, where a pleasant rainfall welcomed us. It was just like being in Paris, again!
It’s been a wonderful trip, and I can highly recommend the places we’ve been. It was fun tracing Vincent’s footsteps in Arles, catching up with the Dumonts for a fun-packed evening in Nimes (where we witnessed two fights in one evening) and teaching the kids a few choice words of French. Travel should enrich the soul, and I think this trip has done just that.
I hope you’ve enjoyed it, folks, and do get in touch if we haven’t seen each other for a long time. Would love to hear what other people are up to.
Thanks again, for joining us, and take care.
And for the rest of the summer, bon voyage, wherever your road takes you.
See you soon,
Rich