The Land of Lavender

Our last group trip of the term! We took a two day trip to Provence this weekend to Arles, Les Baux-de-Provence, Avignon and Chateauneuf-de-pape. All of that crazyness in two days! We boarded the bus early early Saturday morning and headed off to Arles where there is a great Roman amphitheatre. The city was founded in the 4th century (oh, that's old...) It is surrounded by a great wall and includes a very adorable Marche and the place where Van Gogh went insane.
The amphitheatre
hey it's me!
Wandering down the street
Everyone knows this painting by Van Gogh of the Cafe....
This happens to be THE CAFE that he painted!!
Church in the place de la republique
le marche! (aka market)
mmm spices
The yellow building in the background of this very cute little garden is where Van Gogh lived for 15 months and painted over 300 canvases there
.....and it continues.....
We then traveled to Les Baux-de-Provence where we witnessed the Cathedrale d'images. It was fantastic and the only way I can show you is with a video that I will post soon! It is an old quarry where the images of Picasso were shown on the giant rocks. It was soooooo creative
enormous quarry
Then after the Cathedrale d'images, we went up to the medieval section of the town where there is a castle at the top! It was very very windy too

The castle ruins
we had to...
more castle ruins in the beautiful mountains of Provence
looking at the city below where there was a wedding going on!
me again!
My roommate Jennifer and I! She's from Portland also

We watched them launch it too!
beautiful paysages as the french like to say
And then we arrived in Avignon, where we were to stay the night. Our hotel housed all of us (how nice of them....) and we were directly across from the Palais des Papes (Pope's Palace)
This is where the Pope stayed because of violence in Rome and then the Papal Schism.
Sarah, Molly (roommate) and Me!
Avignon view from the church

I found a nun!
This was the view from my hotel room!
On sunday we toured the palais

View from the top of the Palais of Avignon!

After our tour of the Palais we had some free time to grab lunch and wander around. We were not very lucky with our weather on Sunday and it rained ALL day - very very hard too! We traveled from Avignon to Chateauneuf-de-Pape where there were tons of vineyards! We tasted some wine and toured the wine museum. Afterwords, we headed on home. It was a very relaxing weekend and great to see another part of France.