Good morning, Cavaillon!

I awoke before the alarm this morning, got dressed, took the GPS unit our host lent us, and went off to look for a boulangerie (bakery) for our morning baguette (a long, thin loaf of what is commonly called "French bread").

I followed the electronic navigator's instructions, which were a lot more general than that of our Garmin unit back home ("Take the next left" as opposed to "Turn left in zero point two miles......turn left now"), but when I hit a stretch of road and the navigator announced that I could relax for the next dozen kilometers or so, I pulled over to the side of the road, because I had already driven quite a distance from the house and another dozen kilometers meant I was headed for somewhere other than Cavaillon, the city nearest to where we're staying.

I turned off the GPS, turned on my iPad, and fired up my MotionX GPS app, which works despite the absence of a phone network connection. Now my only problem was to study the map while on the side of the road, drive for a while without looking at the iPad, and then pull over to the side and repeat the procedure until I got to where I was going.

Wherever that was.

At one point, a car seemed to stop for no reason to let me pull back onto the road, but I didn't realize the gesture was too good to be true. The other car, you see, had come to stop for a red light at an intersection where one was supposed to come to a halt well short of the intersection (i.e., behind where I was pulled off to the side). After pulling back onto the road, it occurred to me that I had not been the beneficiary of a courtesy, per se, but was in the process of running a red light. I managed to not run the light (which I could not see), and nobody tried to make a wide right turn from the street to my left (which would've made things, um, interesting), and so I managed to escape from my predicament with no adverse effects.

At another point in my wanderings, I missed a fork in the road, and so decided to take a "short cut" that involved an eventual left onto a road on the iPad map that wasn't actually there. Continuing past where I had wanted to turn left, I came to the main road, where I expected to be able to turn left and get back on track, but there was no intersection. Instead, there was a tunnel under the road, the width of which was scarcely greater than that of my vehicle, movement through which was controlled by traffic lights mounted at each end of the tunnel.

It was just one adventure after another, y'know?

I eventually got to Cavaillon, but the traffic in town was pretty intense, the parking spots along the streets were all taken (and almost all of it was "Payant," which meant having to hunt down a vending machine and pay for a ticket that one then displays on top of one's dashboard, and I was plumb out of any but the smallest change, so it's probably just as well that there wasn't any parking, but I digress...). I also saw nothing that resembled a bakery—although in truth, I was too intent on watching the road to look at the scenery. (I did notice—en passant—that the street I had identified in Google as having two bakeries along its length had been turned into a pedestrian mall for some kind of market day. Oh, well...)

In the end, very nearly at the end of my patience, I parked at a hypermarché (which is to a supermarket what a supermarket is to a regular market) and picked up some milk, bread, and a couple of machine-made baguettes. I then drove straight home and Galina and I made breakfast and ate it on the patio outside the kitchen.


It was a fairly plain breakfast, but between the climate (pleasantly cool, at least in the morning), the view (see the photo above ), the food (see the photo below), and the company, it was a veritable feast!


I have put a good dent in the remaining translation work due today, but I better get back to it and finish it off.

Cheers...