Day 5 - Driving to Cannes and the Cote d'Azur

Today was a day of driving...and driving. If you look at a map, you can see that we had a ways to go to get from Paris to the French Riveria. From Paris to Lyon is 290 miles and from Lyon to Cannes is 270...thus a lot of driving!

About an hour before we stopped for lunch, we started feeling a bit warm...and warmer...and finally we realized - the air conditioner was broken. Um? Well, we were hoping Claudio, our hero, would be able to fix it while we ate lunch. So we just drank a lot of water, used our fans, and continued to play cards and visit with each other. Omar probably slept.

We arrived in Orange, a sweet little town in the Provence region of France. We passed fields of lavender and sunflowers! It was killing me to not be able to get close enough for some great photos. It was beautiful...fields of purple...fields of yellow sunflowers! In Orange, are the ruins of a Roman Theatre from the 1st Century! There was room for 7000 spectators! It was abandoned in the 4th century. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We ate lunch at a nice outdoor restaurant, La Cremaillere. We had some time to explore the little shops before we boarded our bus that could not be fixed! Did anyone complain? Not at all! Everyone was wonderful about it. We opened the vents in the top of the bus, kept the fans and water out, and sang our way to Cannes.

That evening we went bowling! Bowling in France, who would have guessed?Now I know this isn't all the teams. I faintly remember that some had already put their equipment away when I started taking photos...so if anyone has photos of the teams I missed...please send them my way so I can post them here.

We dreamed of strikes at the end of Day 5!