Wednesday, October 28, 2015
Dinner last night was a bit different. The main courses were
lamb shank or fish so I had to eat vegetarian. It was vegetables in a cream
sauce inside a puff pastry covered with tomato sauce. I hadn’t seen that
before.
After dinner, we and Graham took a short night-time stroll
under the bridge right in front of us to see the pink-lit Pont d’Avignon. We
are docked directly across the street on the riverbank close to the Pope’s
palace and the city walls. It is most impressive lit up at night and we haven’t
been parked this close to a city center since Amsterdam or Budapest. All our other
mooring sites have been distinctly rural or industrial and remote. This last
week has been closer to all of our expectations and so unusual for the final of
our 4 weeks. Oh, when challenged, Graham found the public shipboard WC’s in one
evening. I had been looking all week! They are tucked into the non-bar entry
side of the reception desk wall. Hidden and we both swore we thought it was a
staff only spot until we really looked for the WCs.
The Gipsy Fever was a group of 2 Spanish guitarists and a
female singer. They are relatives of the more famous Gipsy Kings (which I never
heard of either). It reminded me of the music we heard in Barcelona with a
Cuban flair. None of which I would have associated with Provencal atmosphere. I
guess we are closer to Spain than I realized. It was good until they started
dragging audience members onto the dance floor. I hate forced participation. I
left. They had a good turnout with a majority of the passengers and a good
portion of the staff/crew. It was the largest audience I had seen in there to
date.
As I understand it, this is the last cruise of the season
for Symphony. We aren’t exactly clear on what they do with their boats when
they are not sailing, but presumably maintenance and care. We are getting some
weird dishes now, so I guess they are clearing out the pantry for the season’s
end.
The temperature is in the 60’sF this morning and brightly
sunny. It is hard to imagine that there are thunderstorms predicted almost all
day and that the temperature is supposed to drop rather than rise. I’ll keep
you posted and we’ll dress according to the forecast and not our observations
and keep our fingers crossed for clear skies for another couple of days.
We were parked in the best possible spot today and when we
sailed away, there were 5 riverboats parked behind us. Four were stacked up 2
deep which always sucks and the last was the furthest from the palace. Yeah for
us for once! We have the same guide today as yesterday. She is Austrian and
longwinded without ever really providing any useful details about what you need
to know to get around independently during free time which we are actually
having now. Symphony gives out maps but they aren’t terribly useful either as
they are not detailed enough. So, we had a 2 hour guided tour to the Pope’s
Palace in Avignon today. Then we had about 1 hour and 45 minutes of free time,
in theory. It poured rain and thundered intermittently. We decided to just try
to find the overlook to the Pont d’Avignon. The guide just kept vaguely pointing
off in the opposite direction of the boat and saying it was a good photo
vantage. We eventually found a door in a tower along the wall on that side of
the Pont and climbed over 150 stairs to get up there and then back down. We
were soaked by the time we got back aboard and evidently so did everyone else
because around 12:30pm we started sailing. All aboard was 12:45pm and sailing
was 1pm. I assume everyone came back early and when they thought they had all
the boarding cards that they just left without a word. If we don’t sail without
someone, this will be the first Amadeus boat we’ve been on that didn’t leave
someone ashore because they did not have their boarding card.
Lunch is the taste of Provence buffet. These taste of
buffets have been good on the last 2 boats. At 3:15pm we have the
disembarkation talk. Clay already went to the CD and asked since we fly from
Marseilles at 11:20am and there a bunch of Celebrity people flying out of there
we thought they might put us on a bus with them. No, we have a prepaid taxi to
Marseilles departing at 7:45am. Hopefully they will have an early breakfast
because the last 2 boats our transfers came anywhere from more than 30 minutes
early to 10 minutes early. As our last CD Gunther said, 10 minutes early is not
on time, neither is 10 minutes late, on time is at the time scheduled.
We need to get packed sometime today. We should arrive at
Arles at 4pm and from 4pm to 5:30pm we have a walking tour. We are really
hoping the rain has cleared out by then! Farewell cocktails at 7pm. Farewell
dinner at 7:30pm. Off tomorrow morning on our way home.
Sometime in the afternoon before we arrived in Arles, we
passed a rocky river bank on our port side and right on the rock was built some
kind of fort or castle directly above the Rhone. The sun was shining on it and
it was amazing. It wasn’t announce and though I went upstairs to the lounge to
check the navigation screen, I still don’t know what the place was. We had the
disembarkation talk at 3:15pm. We and one other couple are disembarking early
with private transfers. The other couple has to leave at 6:45am and we are
being picked up at 7:45am. Graham was ignored entirely and assumed he’d have to
get a cab in the morning to his Arles hotel. (When we got back from the Arles
walking tour, he found a note in his cabin that a cab would take him at 10am.)
The rest of the meeting was about the Celebrity guests. A couple of differences
on this boat vs. the others though it may just have to do with the small number
of passengers. They never used the color coded tour tickets. They aren’t using
the colored ribbons on the luggage for disembarkation either.
We arrived in Arles on schedule. We headed out for 4 to
5:30pm walking tour. We strolled from Quai Lamartine to Place Voltaire to the
old Roman amphitheater to the old Roman theater to the Place de la Republic to
the Espace van Gogh (where he was hospitalized for cutting off his ear) to the
boat. It had gotten cold and it was getting dark so not many people stayed in
town. At least some skipped the tour to go shopping here from the outset. Clay and
I detoured to the fun fair right at the quai to visit the crepe stand where we
had seen a line up on the way out. It was miel (honey) and a big hot mess!
The cocktail party was as normal except that they introduced
the entire kitchen staff which the other boats have done before serving the Baked
Alaska. This way made dinner shorter. This boat has definitely gotten the memo
about the long meals. In any event, the number of chefs made those waits even
more inexplicable on this boat. There were at least 2 chefs per table! That
coupled with 1 waiter for every 6 guests and no one should have ever
experienced any waits.
Dinner was pretty much the usual menu. Surf and turf and Baked
Alaska with lobster soup, a fish course and a sorbet palate cleanser course.
We need to get up early in the morning. I will publish this
now.
