A Gallery of Photos: To France to Paint (Again): Avignon

Looking across the Rhône to Avignon

As described in this blog, just a year ago, mid-October, I joined a group of local watercolor painters to take part in a week's painting trip to Provence. Can heaven provide any better activity in any better locale, I asked myself. Then, when the week was over and we Vermonters were home again, I promised myself that I would go again this year since the organizers were planning a repeat trip.  (In fact, half of last year's group decided to return.)

And that is just what I have now done, having arrived home just a few days ago.  This second trip was on a par with the glories of the first.  By that I mean:  great weather, gorgeous scenery, great co-painters, fabulous food and Côtes du Rhône wines.  And this time, going a month earlier, we hit upon the vendange, the grape harvesting.

Our organizers also added a few pre-trip days in Avignon so that we could get over jet lag before embarking on our week of painting in Provence's nearby Vaison-la-Romaine, a small town that boasts Roman ruins along with an entire medieval quarter.

So, I begin this series of four postings with a view of Avignon, a place that became a well-loved town back in the days when my husband was alive and our young daughter was getting a good view of the world as she traveled with us.  We three danced on the medieval Saint-Bénézet bridge as we sang "Sur le pont d'Avignon," attended the Avignon theater, film, and music festival, witnessed the Bastille Day fireworks.  So, one can well imagine that I was especially anxious to re-new old memories when I learned that Avignon had been added to this year's itinerary.

This trip, we stayed close in, in the sweet little Hotel Regina on the Place de l'Horloge, just near the Palais des Papes, the great medieval gothic Palace of the Popes, there since the 14th century when the papacy split between Rome and France.

To place it properly, Avignon is an hour's drive north of the Mediterranean city of Marseille.  Vaison-la-Romaine is another hour northeast of that, still in the Rhône River region.

Palace of the Popes

Looking up at the Palace of the Popes

Looking toward the Palace from the town across the river

Handsome plane trees and building

Note the trompe l'oeil painted in the upper window

Typical residence

Our hotel

Cups, cups, cups in a coffee and tea shop

Delightfully tempting pastries

Pork tenderloin and friends

This happened to be the very spot where our van's GPS said Avignon's TGV train station was located.  The GPS was subsequently given a scolding and turned off.  This is, of course, the middle of the Rhône River just a few miles down from the heart of Avignon.

Future postings:
Number 2:  Benedictine Abbey Gardens in Fort Saint-André, Villeneuve-lès-Avignon
Number 3:  Vaison-la-Romaine
Number 4:  Neighboring towns

Canoeing on the Retreat Meadows

Where the West River and the Meadows join

A bit of explanation may be appreciated since one doesn't usually canoe on meadows.  But these are water-meadows.  And non-seasonal at that.  What was once prime farmland flooded when a certain dam was completed in 1909.  Now, winter, those same lake-like "meadows" are covered with ice-fishing shacks.  Summer, they host kayaks and canoes.  They are called the Retreat Meadows because they are adjacent to the Brattleboro Retreat, a hospital complex for mental health and addictions.

What happens here geographically is that two rivers meet--the great Connecticut, the boundary (here) between Vermont and New Hampshire, and the lesser but exciting West River that can thunder down the slopes and produce such disasters as Hurricane Irene's destruction when something like 13 Vermont towns/villages were isolated from any traffic in or out (other than helicopter) because our lovely "babbling" rivers, of which this was one, brought on havoc!  Though adjacent to the Connecticut, the meadows are more a part of the West River.

What the West River looks like when said to be "babbling."

Okay ... so some weeks ago, seeing summer flee, as it is prone to do, having celebrated the Fourth of July, knowing that Labor Day was imminent, I told a certain member of the family that before summer was over, I wanted us to go canoeing ... and especially since it had been several years since we had last been.

So we picked yesterday to go.  Good temperatures--mid-70s.  A bit of cloud cover so we wouldn't fry out on the water.  A Sunday when she and her little ones weren't otherwise engaged.  We met up at the canoe rental spot, paid our $25 for one hour, and embarked.  It turned out to be the 12- and 8-year olds' first canoe trip. So she gave them an on-the-spot tutorial in rowing since both wanted to be engaged in this fun family activity.

It was a perfect day--paddling away, enjoying ourselves, catching glimpses of Canada geese, ducks, an egret (or was it a heron?), curly water-weeds, and other Sunday folks out on the meadows with the sense that the water was so shallow, the draft of the canoe so slight, that one could step out and not be submerged.

Fishing

What The Meadows will look like in two months

More from My Travel Sketch Book

Since it's vacation time, I thought I'd include more pages from my travel sketch book (see my June 16th posting) as further inspiration for you to start a sketch book of your own.

Olive trees and the Alpilles mountains in Provence

Scenes from Dieulefit, France

A Marsden Hartley painting in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts

Looking out over the hills of Ojai, California

Calvin Coolidge's Vermont birthplace

The Indian Ocean from a beach in Bali

Wooden statue of Guanyin at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (great spot, by the way)

A local lake, done to the tune of bull frogs.

Crossing the Canadian Rockies by train

Why Not Start Your Own Travel Sketch Book?

From a friend's garden in California

I've been using the same book now for 20 years to make sketches of places I visit, whether it's up the road or across the ocean.  (I had a duplicate book strictly for home scenes for many years ... until I filled it up.  Petunias in my garden, newly dyed Easter eggs, rainbow chard from the farmers' market.  That sort of thing.)

Besides being able to review my various trips, I find my travel sketch book a wonderful diary.  What year was it I went off to Scotland, I ask myself?  And there it is: 1998.  Or I simply browse through the pages and enjoy such renderings as a calm morning sea in Maine, a celadon bowl in a D.C. museum. The book is small, easy to carry, with an attached pen-holder.  As well, I keep a few stubs of colored pencils in a tiny tin box that fits into my pocket. There's little to carry, nothing to weigh me down.

Here she is in all her glory.

Except for the little tin box with lid on the right, everything else stays home.

It's all great fun and, as I say, a lovely reminder of just where and when I went and what I saw.

Provence, France

Coronation Chair, Westminster Abbey

Diamond Head, Waikiki

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Ubud, Bali

Harbin Hot Springs, California ... with statues on the lawn.  In 2015 all of Harbin Hot Springs and half the neighboring town of Middletown were reduced to ash and rubble in the Valley Fire.

Entry to Sena Plaza, Santa Fe

National Portrait Gallery, D.C. ... Gertrude Stein statue made to look like a seated Buddha

Regent's Park, London

Friend at Groton Long Point, Connecticut

Perking Up

I recently bumped into something that perked me up immediately--The Little Book of Hygge, Danish Secrets to Happy Living by Meik Wiking who calls himself the CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen.  "Hygge" is a Danish word (pronounced hoo-ga) which the jacket describes as being about "savoring the simple pleasures in life."  Such as staying in with "your tribe" on a winter's eve with board games, a luscious dessert, and cups of hot chocolate or mulled wine.  All ways, the author adds, that Danes manage to survive their dark, miserable winters.

So I decided to come up with a perking-up list of my own.

• First, think spring!
• Engage in, appreciate, and promote humor.  (Think Norman Cousins, the vitamin C man, who in conquering an illness, watched Marx Brothers movies regularly so that he could have the body-and-soul benefit of some good guffaws.)
• Sit in candlelight (or firelight) some evenings.  No electricity.
• Go on a news/media fast.  (Think Dr. Andrew Weil, the holistic health guru, who speaks of the health benefits of no-news/ media.)
• Eat chocolate.
• Buy yourself some daffodils.
• Get out in nature.  Hikes are good.  Family picnics. 
• Plan your garden so that it will be filled with flowers.  Or your windowsill with herbs.
• Give someone a surprise gift.  I received a surprise bouquet recently; I can't describe what pleasure it gave me!
• Play a musical instrument on a regular basis.  Or sing.  Or take lessons.  
• Laugh with your book group.   If you don't have one, start one.  (Ours is currently reading Annie Dillard's An American Childhood.  Highly recommended.)
• Come up with a worthy project:  beginning your memoirs, serving in a soup kitchen, decluttering something, learning to sing jazz, clearing out your storage unit ...
• Appreciate!  Beauty, flexibility, a new understanding about something, a pet, a wise choice you once made, a good night's sleep, your tribe ... 

And right now I appreciate March because all those wintry months are finally taking a powder.  Whoopee!!

And Now For Something A Little Different

It's been some time since I've had a similar post, but I guarantee you will enjoy these links that friends have sent me.  Exquisite Cuban ballet dancers in Havana's streets, French chateaux for sale, majestic libraries old and new, and photos of D-Day that morph into the same setting 70 years later.


1.  Cuban dancers  (give it a little time for the images to come up)

2.  French chateaux

3.  Majestic libraries

4.  D-Day scenes (drag the mouse back and forth to see the scene in 1944 and then 2014) D-Day 

Genealogy Jag Update

(See my April 21st posting.)

Gotta admit:  this was a whole lot more work than I expected.  I finished what I set out to do but found much more material than I wanted to deal with so didn't carry on "down the years."  Obviously, as one goes on back, it becomes less accurate, and I didn't want to spend hours accessing maybe-so/maybe-no data.  Like someone who was born, had his family, and died all within the (given) years of, say, 1504-1515.  Or the man whose dates indicated that his mother had been born several years after he had already died.  Or, for that matter, so many possible branches with more and more names and dates that it would make any reader's head spin.  Then, too, some researchers seemed so zonked out by the time they got to the 1400s that they put down 20th century dates just to liven things up.

I was hooked into one of those genealogical web-sites that gives the names of the parents of whomever one keys in.  Which would be fine but such information can go back centuries.  Then, of course, as I've already said, if the connection is spurious, why pursue it.  I got lords and ladies, sheriffs of this English county and that, three Lord Mayors of London, most of which I discarded since I had no idea if the connection was legitimate.  I traced one family through their thousand years in England to find the "first" of the family was a Tuscan who had befriended William the Conqueror. There was no way I wanted to write all their particulars down so was glad when I found a glitch that allowed me to scratch all that.  You might well say:  some researcher you are!  Right.  Too much work at this point.  But I wanted what I ended up with to be as accurate as possible.

So I stayed this side of the pond though admit that continuing on back brought up some wonderful names.  Like Fulke Le Strange, 1st Lord of Blackmere.  Such a name makes you think of a children's book about medieval knights--which I guess he was.  I also got someone akin to the Sheriff of Nottingham as a possible ancestor.  Yikes.  And after all those Robin Hood movies, too!  But then to compensate, I had a good chuckle when a Mr. Fisher married a Miss Fryer.

Then I was given the name Sallye Lnu as the 16th century Welsh mother of another possible ancestor, but the name Lnu didn't fit a Welsh lass of any century.  But there it was, written out, and repeated by other researchers. Then, of course, I realized it wasn't a name at all but the initials for Last Name Unknown.

And then records get hazy after awhile.  One poor woman was listed as having had 30 children. And there was the man who was born in The Tower of London!  Goodness, I thought, what brought that about!  But then I found it was Tower Street, London.  An important difference.

So, you see, it can be fun, it can be interesting, but there's a lot of fuzzy information.  Even a lot of un-fuzzy information which is why I decided to just list the more recent folks I was fairly sure about and suppose someone else might want to take up the banner one day and plow into the rest.

Yet ... so much for my promise to just investigate "the recent folks."  Right after saying that, I found 41 generations of one Welsh family ending in the year 500.  Afterwards, I got up from my chair feeling as if I'd been out on the high seas, I was so wobbly.

Ancestor Stuff, or My Genealogy Jag

No, I'm not going to talk about some antecedent who memorized a thousand verses from the Bible ... or a great aunt with seventeen cats. But I am going to admit that one recent evening when I'd finished my book and there was nothing on TV, I picked up my laptop and started exploring, and for some reason that I can't now remember (and that doesn't matter, anyway), I keyed in the name of my paternal grandfather and his city (Baltimore).  Lo and behold, what should I find but a link that turned out to show a full length photo of him dating from the 1880s when he was in his late teens.  Dressed to the nines and looking pretty natty.  The odd thing was that I had never seen a picture of him before.  Well, a snapshot around 1900 but hat and bushy mustache pretty well hid his features.

Okay, I was hooked.  I'd already done a lot of genealogical research some years ago, but I decided to see if I could fill in some gaps.  And I have to say, I'm finding it all very interesting.  Maybe that's because I'm part historian, part researcher, as well as someone curious to know why those relatives left Virginia in 1808 and moved to Tennessee, or was that x-times great grandmother really related to that Confederate general, or did that particular great great great grandfather fight in that battle described in our national anthem?

I'm also impressed anew that each generation doubles the number of ancestors from the generation before so that if you go back ten generations (the 17th century for me) we each have 1,024 direct ancestors.  And, if you go back to the Norman Conquest, I've read that we have more than a billion. Of course, there weren't even that many people on the planet then. Hmmm...  so how does that work?  A piece about it suggests that part of the answer, at least, lies in cousins marrying cousins (which happened more frequently "back then").

So here I am now checking dates in early Virginia, traveling overland to California in 1846, learning who fought for the north and who for the south. And I found a 2-times-great grandmother who, after she died at age twenty-six, had a clipper ship built and named for her that took some of the first Gold Rush folks around the Horn to San Francisco, carried a cargo of tea from China to England, and brought back a boatload of Irish immigrants to Philly.  I'm even getting a book out of the library on clipper ships of that era--which I wouldn't have thought to look at otherwise.

Well, it's one of those intriguing, elucidating things to do.  After awhile, though, you get the sense that with so many antecedents, everyone has to be related to everyone!