Campervan Therapy

I’ve wanted to go to the Palais des Papes in Avignon since I read Charles Dickens’ travelogue about visiting it on a cold winter’s day, with his wife and children, before repacking them all into carriage and horses to continue to Genoa.

We tried once ages ago, our teenage children with us, in blistering August heat, with no choice but to abandon ship, and head for the nearest campsite with as many water slides as possible to keep said teenagers from revolution.

We pull into Camping Bagatelle, on an island in the Rhône, with a view of the ancient town walls and the Palais des Papes itself in all its gleaming limestone.

We’re bowled away by the cavernous building, with its many refectories, treasuries, towers, chapels, cloisters – and the spectacular Chambre du Cerf – where the vibrant frescoes of hunting scenes seem strangely incongruous for papal bedrooms.

Instead of holy saints, there’s a servant coaxing a pigeon out of a tree, another hunting down a stag, another fishing in the stew pond.

The tablets we’re issued with show us graphics of how richly furnished and decorated the vast arched ceilinged rooms would have been – with red and green hangings, tapestries, frescoes on every inch of wall, dark, stout chests and chairs.

The vast treasury housed so many clerks. I guess they needed them to sort out all those pennies from the indulgences they sold. The information boards about the great schism between the King of France and the Pope in Rome sums up the power grab which was prevalent during the hundred years when popes lived in Palais des Papes.

The art installations by Jean Michel Othoniel are wonderful, necklaces and imaginary cosmos after cosmos, night skies – and tombs made of a lapis lazuli hued glass, echoing the colour used in frescoes. My technical one, of course, looks at the tomb, guffaws at the description which tells us it symbolizes the ghost of Love that’s left the tomb to lead us around Avignon.

              “Looks like a blue box to me,” he mutters.

But even my dear old cynic is spellbound by the imaginary planets all interconnected with their reflections splashed through the river of blue below.

One more museum is all the dear man can take, so we go to the Louvre exhibition of Medieval to early Renaissance art in La Petite Palais de Papes and it amused me how much my atheist husband loves a religious themed triptych.

We end the evening in the restaurant on the campsite surrounded by school children staying at its youth hostel.

One teacher quips that he’s sorry our romantic meal will soon be ruined by school dinner hall cacophony. But he’s relieved when we tell him we’ve been teachers for years, so we’re used to it.

And these French children are so civilized, not one pea is thrown, no one spills their water over the table. They make their way through three courses, without one argument about the crudité starter. We are seriously impressed.

A biblical storm sends plane tree leaves whirling through the campsite the next morning and the Rhône looks worryingly high as we wave goodbye to the campsite island in the middle of the river with its wonderful view of the Palais des Papes.