On the Way to Everywhere

Mei Ling and I loved Paris on our most recent visit but we still wouldn't put it on quite the same level as our favorites of London and New York City. One area in which Paris has those two beat hands down is the number of amazing destinations within a two hour drive of the city limits. In the past we had visited Versailles, Chartres, and Orléans to the southwest and on this trip we had driven through Picardy to the northeast. Now that we were coming back towards Paris from the southeast I had to find a worthy city to spend our final night. It was quickly apparent that the best candidate was Provins, another fascinating medieval walled town that was once a regional economic powerhouse. Our Airbnb hosts had insisted on meeting us personally which is usually an annoyance, but in this case it was a blessing because there was absolutely nowhere to park in the streets around our apartment. Once we had brought our luggage inside from an illegal parking place, our hosts waited in their parking spot for me to round the block so that I could occupy it as they left. Our building was on a narrow street close to the base of the hill where the medieval town was located. of course over the centuries the town had enlarged and now the lower town surrounding the hill was much larger than the original city.

We walked up to the medieval city along Rue Saint-Thibault on the northern side of the hill. We passed by people lined up to see one of the town's more unusual attractions, the remnants of underground quarries called Les Souterrains. A large stone hôtel-dieu had been built atop the quarries centuries ago and it was now an actual hotel. We didn't have time to take the tour and I wasn't sure that dim underground caves would have been of much interest anyway. At the end of the road there were lovely classical buildings, including a majestic neo-Gothic structure with religious iconography indicating that it had at one point been a convent or a school.

We were now at the northeast corner of one of the most picturesque locations in Provins, the Place du Châtel. The timber frames of the buildings had been painted in bright colors to enhance the visual appeal, although it could be argued that the effect was overdone. Two police officers on horseback emerged from a side street and guided their steeds around the perimeter of the square, possibly looking out for illegally parked vehicles. I can't imagine what other transgressions they might have been looking out for in such an idyllic location.

From the square we walked past a few blocks of old stone houses to reach the massive stone walls at the western edge of the town. These thirteenth century fortifications protected the population from potential assaults by brigands during the opulent Champagne Fairs the city was renowned for in medieval times.

Only two kilometers of the original five remain standing but they were accessible by stairs and it was enjoyable to walk a short distance along the ramparts. To the west there was almost nothing except for open fields dotted with groves of trees and a few farmhouses. We weren't high enough to look over the rooftops of Provins but in the distance we could see the upper parts of the town's most famous buildings.

I had taken the risk of buying advance tickets to a show called Eagles of the Ramparts which took place in an amphitheater that had been constructed at the base of the walls. It was the first show of the season and I was worried it might sell out. It turned out there were plenty of seats unfilled but it was still probably fortunate that I had bought tickets because the deadline kept us from loafing around in Troyes and the lower town of Provins. I had actually forgotten what the show was about with everything else that had been going on and I told the kids it was something like a medieval fair with jousting. Of course it turned out to be exactly what the name indicated, a demonstration of falconry as well as a showcase of other birds of prey normally housed in an aviary near the amphitheater. The only drawback was that the sun was hanging over the walls and shining directly into our eyes for most of the show. By the time I realized how much of a problem this was it was too late to switch seats or one of us might have suffered a direct hit from one of the raptors that was swooping just over the heads of the audience.

In general it was an enjoyable show with beautiful birds including eagles, owls, an buzzards along with the falcons. Perhaps the most impressive animal was the long-legged and graceful secretary bird which I had only previously seen in photographs. We were sitting in the front row which provided amazing close-ups to the birds when they alit on the fence that separated the audience from the stage. After the show we were invited to tour the aviary but it was nowhere near as much fun seeing the birds perched in their enclosures as it had been to watching them swoop around the amphitheater in glorious freedom.

We walked back to Place du Châtel where we realized we needed a bathroom break. We figured we would have to buy a drink or a snack to be allowed to use a restroom at such a touristy spot. Mei Ling and the kids ducked into a creperie before I could check the reviews, which described horrendously slow service. Things worked out for the best because we had all managed to use the restroom before anyone bothered to come over and take our order and we quickly got up and left.

Aside from all the colorful half-timbered houses and stone cottages, Provins had a couple of truly unique and magnificent buildings that didn't resemble anything else we had seen on this journey. The Tour César is a twelfth century fortress with an octagonal central tower and four corner turrets. The structure was built by the Count of Champagne to manifest his control of the wealthy city and contained several dungeons to incarcerate criminals and enemies of the state. The lower wall surrounding the artificial hill was erected by the British after they conquered Provins during the Hundred Years’ War.

Just to the east of Tour César was the Collégiale Saint-Quiriace, another twelfth century edifice which has a quite unusual shape due to having been truncated for lack of funds. The nave of the church was supposed to extend through what is now a large courtyard, but when the funds ran out a rather plain façade was erected to enclose the space. As we walked along the street next to the church that led downward to the lower town we could see how the Latin cross of the church had been reversed so that the choir was longer than the nave.

The lower town was quite atmospheric as well, although of course it didn't feel as ancient or historic as the medieval city on the hill. The main commercial street was Rue de Val which eventually forked into two. We followed the branch which seemed to have more restaurants, although we didn't want to choose one until we had explored the whole neighborhood. At the entryway of a store which had already closed there was a vending machine that contained complete meals in sealed microwaveable pots. It seemed like a creative way for people to have an economic but sophisticated meal with a minimum of effort.

Eventually we came to an area that was clearly the end of the older part of town. Fortuitously there was a restaurant here that had just opened and had plenty of our favorites on the menu. We sat in the corner underneath a painting of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin. We soon realized it was lucky we had arrived early as the remaining tables in the restaurant quickly filled. Dinner was good although not at the same level as the best meals we had had in Champagne. On the way back to the apartment the old streets were bathed in bright yellow light from the lanterns that were attached to the upper levels of the buildings at regular intervals.

On Sunday morning we gathered the remaining bread and cheese and snacks that we had accumulated over the last couple of days and fixed ourselves breakfast in the apartment. Our hosts had kindly left us a bottle of fizzy cider to wash it down with. We walked back to the fork at the Rue de Val, which by the light of day we saw was occupied by the Hôtel de Ville. This time we took the other branch of the fork which ended at the Saint-Ayoul church, which was an odd-looking structure in many ways. The three Gothic portals and the peculiar triangular gable data back to the thirteenth century while the balustraded gallery and domed turret on the left are Renaissance era additions. The entire structure was unusually weather-beaten for a church in a touristy French town close to Paris, making me wonder if this was a conscious aesthetic decision to emphasize its antiquity.

For our final twenty minutes in Provins we explored the remaining parts of the lower town that we hadn't seen, such as the surviving bell tower of the Notre-Dame-du-Val church that was destroyed during the French Revolution. Arched portals had been placed in the walls of the tower to allow a road to pass through it. We found our way to the grassy cloister of Saint-Ayoul before walking back along Rue de Val to our apartment. The town was finally beginning to stir awake on Sunday morning and whatever shops were going to open that day had begun setting out their merchandise. We didn't bother moving the car from its parking spot to the front of our building - we just dragged our bags along the street for a block and tossed them into the trunk one last time.

I had tried to put the flight home out of my mind as much as possible because I knew it would be even more unpleasant than the outgoing flight. Since we were leaving in the afternoon there was little chance of any of us sleeping and because of jetlag it was better for the kids to stay awake. Of course there was no anticipation factor to make the flight seem more worthwhile, and for good measure the duration was ten hours instead of nine due to the jet stream. Long flights are an unavoidable downside of travel to Europe or Asia and of course they are far outweighed by the benefits.

I prefer a window seat but I'm not about to pay extra for one. In this case ninety-five percent of the flight was over ocean so it wouldn't have made much of a difference. I sat between Ian and Cleo in the center block while Mei Ling sat with Spenser on the right. I hadn't brought a book, knowing that the discomfort of the flight would destroy my attention span and I would get in a half hour of reading at the most. Instead I turned my attention to the depressing array of entertainment options on the screen in front of me. There were dozens of movies available, almost all of which had plots so cliched that I cringed as soon as I read the first sentence of the summary. I tried watching "One Battle After Another" which had just won the Oscar for best film and switched it off after five minutes for being absurd and just pervasively awful. A French film called Météors wasn't much better and turned me off from the non-American section, which is usually my go-to for at least one reasonably good movie. I finally decided to check out a series called Severance, which I was familiar with but had never tried watching because prior flights hadn't offered the first episodes. It was likewise difficult to watch due to being ponderous and repetitive but I stuck with it for the simple reason that I was out of options.

In the end I watched all three episodes of Severance that were available and I was glad that I did because even though I was bored for most of it, it stimulated some interesting thoughts about travel and writing. The central concept of the series is that a group of people have allowed their employer to surgically segregate their memories so that their work personas (the Innies) have no knowledge of their outside lives (the Outies) and vice versa. Naturally a confusing and dystopian mayhem ensues but what I found more interesting was the correlation of the plot to my own two existences; a doctor and schoolwork enforcer in Miami (the Innie) and a cultural sponge and family tour guide everywhere else (the Outie). Of course my memories aren't segregated per se, but I have noted quite often that after a few days of travel my home existence begins to feel like a distant dream. Our experiences in foreign lands feel extremely vivid and unforgettable at the time, but after returning to the banalities of home life the memories soon become fuzzy and blend together. I'm just not satisfied with those fuzzy memories which is one reason why I commit so much time and effort at home towards documenting our experiences and placing them in an informative context. Just the act of writing solidifies my memories to the extent that I can look at the title of an entry I wrote a decade ago and recall most of the photographs and even much of the text. When I'm trapped in some tiresome or unpleasant place like the dentist's chair I can transport myself back to any one of those hundreds of cities I've described and retrace our footsteps in detail. Writing helps me break down the memory wall between my Innie and my Outie. And of course my kids will have a much more significant barrier between their adult Innies and their childhood Outies, thanks to their ages when they traveled and the fact that they don't actively focus on memorizing details. My greatest hope is that one day the kids will use my blog so that their own early travel experiences won't be lost to oblivion the way most of my childhood memories have been.

It's now almost the end of March and I have two months to write the last six chapters about last summer's trips through the mid-Atlantic USA, China, and the Malaysian peninsula as well as what I expect to be at least ten chapters about the France trip from which we just returned. At the same time I need to intensively research our upcoming six week summer trip through the British Isles that will be followed by another three weeks in China. It will be a lot of work, especially since I'll be doing three or four night shifts a week and of course all the usual schoolwork monitoring and activity shuttling for the kids. The France trip might be the last one that I document so exhaustively, since I've probably averaged about two hours of writing every day since the end of the last summer trip (when we haven't been been traveling). It's been rewarding but I'd like to have more time to work on other things like setting up my own website. I haven't decided exactly how I'm going to reduce my time investment in writing, but it will probably mean focusing more on the highest value destinations such as London and Edinburgh and just sticking to the highlights of some of the less renowned cities.

Final note: Here I am at the end of May, having completed my final article about our France trip. I enjoyed writing about Paris and Champagne so much that the blog ballooned from an expected ten chapters to nineteen. I'm finally caught up with just six days to go before we leave on our summer trip, which has now been modified to include ten days in Finland and Estonia at the end. There's only one thing I know for sure, which is that I will not be writing another one hundred travel articles between August and the following May the way I did over the past year. I'm looking forward to writing about London, Edinburgh, Hunan, and Tallinn but the block by block chronicles are a thing of the past.