2002 Aigue Morte: Shortly after Pavelas, we came upon a sign for a town called Aigue Morte, which means something like the Agony of Death or Pain of Death. How’s that for a smart public relations move, choosing such a name for your home town? Can you imagine the discussion in the town council? What were they thinking? Anyway, it was not in any of our guide books so we had no idea what was there. We imagined things like Crusaders killing natives, or prisons where people were tortured to death. When we passed it, we saw a pretty large walled city in whitish limestone with a large round tower with a little round tower sticking up off to the side of the top. Later we stopped at a roadside information booth and gathered some information pamphlets. The city was built by Saint Louis, one of the sixteen French kings named Louis , in the 13^th century. He had this built to protect the Rhone against Sarazen invaders. Adelle wants to go back for a closer look, but we’re still not sure.

2005 Aigue Morte: Our destination was Aigues Morte, a city that we mentioned in our last letter. This is the port city from which the Crusaders sailed to the Holy Land. We’d seen it from the road on our last trip, and thought we’d like to take a closer look. It is a large, kind of white-looking walled city with many gates, towers, and an ancient lighthouse. Spectacular on the outside, but the inside was mostly cafes and shops for tourists so we didn’t stay too long. We visited a 13^th century church, walked around for a while and left.

2002 The Camargue: We were quite near the Camargue region and Provence, where there are a lot of promising things and places. The Camargue is on the Mediterranean coast. Native white horses roam free on the flat marshland, flamingos crowd the bays, and black cattle with white longish horns are raised. We headed for a region containing Arles, Nimes and Avignon. It has been our practice to go on the roads marked in red in our maps. This time, we opted for a yellow road – rated even worse than the second-rate red roads. But it followed the sea. We passed a strip of beach about 10 kilometers long. The water was actually an azure color, even though the Cote d’Azure doesn’t begin until farther east. The road was totally lined with cars , motorhomes and caravans, but though it was right next to the beach, few people were on the beach. It was warmer than we have experienced but not quite beach weather yet. Many of the motorhomes and caravans had decals with "D". This means that they were from Germany (Deutschland). I guess if you’re from that far north, this beach is heaven. It certainly was very nice to look at.

The road led right through a beach city, Sete, and a beach town, Pavelas both of which were very crowded with people on holiday. Sete was quite large with a great harbor in which were large fishing vessels and cruise ships, and lots of private boats. Pavelas also had a kind of canal harbor on which many private boats were moored. It was very "beach tacky" – with little stores everywhere, unbelievable numbers of people and general chaos. Unfortunately, the signs for the highway disappeared just as we got into the thick of the confusion. Ron made a wrong turn into a one way street and had to back out against a stream of French cars determined to get past him and get on with the fun. As he was backing and turning, they just scooted around the left front end, going up on the curb when necessary. This occurred in front of a crowd of pedestrians standing around and gaping, and crossing both in front and back of us. For us, a toothache would have been more pleasant. But we got out of there, found the right road and continued on.