When it rains, it pours.

After waking with much anticipation to spend a couple days relaxing on a boat, we opened the curtains to check out the weather. Oh crap! The wind was howling and huge waves were crashing upon the shore. We noticed all the boats in the harbor were gone. We logged onto the internet to check the weather and we noticed the next two days were filled with rain and thunderstorms. We used google translator to help communicate our situation to the guys at the front desk and had them call our sailboat guides and cancel our trip.

Now what? We have no plans. We have no hotel for the next 2 nights. We need to return our rental car. Time to think fast…our solution was to drive several hours to the highly recommended city of Avignon. We booked a room online and checked out. We visited the sea-side Picasso museum where we could see 2-3 meter waves crashing along the nearby rocks; a storm was brewing outside. Unfortunately, we couldn’t locate the europcar shop in Antibes to extend our car rental. After much frustration, we were unable to extend car reservation over the phone so we had to drive several hours out of our way to Toulon and sort out our car situation at the Europcar office where we were returning the car.

We finally arrived at our hotel after 6 hours of driving and navigating our way through stormy Provence. Lee-Anne did all the driving since Russ can’t drive a stick. (This is going to change in the next few months)


Our day in Avignon was magical! The walled old town was beautiful and featured the Palace of the Popes. This is where popes started residing in 1303 for about 100 years while Italy and Rome where unstable. We toured the Palace, an old bridge across the Rhone River, and the old town. Highlights included: finding a shop of cyber designed clothes, going to a museum, and conversing with a traveler from Malaysia named Sam over a delicious 3-course meal.


Our next destination is the hip, chic old-fishing village of Saint Tropez. On our way we stopped for lunch in Aix-en-Provence.