Oui Love France

Eurostar Avignon service expands direct route to Provence

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Eurostar Avignon service Palais des Papes

Eurostar will always have an air of romance for me – the first holiday I took with my husband was by train to Provence. Back in 1997 before budget airlines had got off the ground, if you didn’t drive across France, taking the Eurostar from London and changing to a TGV service in Paris or Lille was the way to go.

Whilst budget flights now operate daily to nearby Nimes and Marseille, travelling to Provence by train still holds huge appeal – it’s nostalgic, can be relaxing – but changing trains with heavy holiday bags is off putting if you aren’t seeing lower costs to make up for the inconvenience.

So when I heard about direct Eurostar services opening up to Avignon, I knew this could make train travel from the UK to Provence much easier. The journey, at speeds of up to 300 kph takes under six hours but thus far weekly Eurostar Avignon direct services have operated only in peak season. For 2014 Eurostar have opened up ticket sales earlier and added extra weeks to the timetable, now running from 28 June to 13 September. If demand grows as expected, Eurostar are planning a year round service to Avignon from 2015, making it easier for holiday makers to explore the region.

Avignon is a gateaway to a holiday in Provence. Notable local attactions include the Palais des Papes (pictured), wine region Chateauneuf du Pape and the rolling landscape of the Luberon. We’ve found nearby town St Remy-de-Provence a perfect base for exploring both the Vaucluse and Bouches du Rhone areas of Provence.

There are many advantages of direct Eurostar services across France over air or road travel; no need to check in luggage, being free to stretch your legs on the train. Not getting stuck on the motorway nor hunting down decent loos in service areas scores points over driving too.  Both parents can give kids their full attention on the train – neither parent is driving, no one is trying to read a map.

But what about price? Eurostar direct tickets to Avignon start from a competitive £109 return per person – it’s hard to beat that by air during school holiday periods. And even if you have time or inclination to drive, the final price for a family of four including ferry, petrol, motorway tolls, meals and overnight hotel costs each direction en route to the south of France can easily hit £500.

Tickets for the direct services move as fast as the trains. A spokesperson told us Eurostar encourage travellers to book Eurostar tickets to Avignon early, “The Brits love affair with the South of France is stronger than ever. By opening sales to Avignon earlier than usual and by extending services we are serving the growing number of people choosing high-speed rail over air. Increasingly passengers see their rail journey as part of the holiday itself.”

 

Eurostar Avignon Service – the low down

The direct weekly Eurostar Avignon service is available throughout summer from only £109 return in Standard class and £249 return in Standard Premier. If direct services are full, Eurostar offers connecting services all year round which arrive into Avignon TGV station, located just outside the town centre. Tickets for the connecting services are available from 90 days in advance of travel from £119 return in Standard class and £239 return in Standard Premier.

Eurostar customers can also take advantage of a deal with car rental company Avis comprising exclusive rates and an on-board car hire check-in process to help avoid queues on arrival. 

Tickets for Eurostar’s Avignon direct summer services are available from www.eurostar.com, by calling 08432 186 186, at Eurostar stations or from travel agents.

3 places to stay in St Remy de Provence

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This summary of 3 places to stay in St Remy de Provence first featured on Maison Cupcake.com

Too sick to to cook this week, I am taking you a weekend mini break in my favourite town on earth, St-Rémy-de-Provence. >As you might expect by the name, St Rémy is at the heart of Provence, southern France around 20km between Avignon and Arles. It has been home to Romans, Nostradamus, Van Gogh and Princess Caroline of Monaco. With chic hotels, shops and restaurants, St Rémy has an upmarket Parisien air. I have been fortunate enough to stay there around half a dozen times in the past twelve years and have watched it become even more well-to-do in that time. That’s not to say that it isn’t friendly or welcoming. No St Tropez snobbishness or disdain here. St Rémy is very down to earth and there are still a few scruffy buildings waiting to be renovated… but you’d better be quick!

Small but perfectly formed, St Rémy forms a tightly packed circle around a single plane tree lined boulevard. With 10,000 inhabitants yet stuffed with maybe fifty restaurants, it is clear that food is high on people’s priorities here. The Wednesday market draws a huge crowd each week. >Our most recent visit was for 2 nights in September this year. I can show you round the hotel where we stayed and let you know about a couple of other places we have stopped in before. In a future post I will show you some places we visited nearby such as the Sunday Antique Fair at L’Isle sur la Sorgue.


The garden at Hotel Les Ateliers de l’image >We returned to one of our honeymoon hotels; Les Ateliers de l’image. Initially a quirky three star hotel built in the shell of the town’s old cinema that made it onto the pages of the popular boutique Hip Hotels guide. The name means “Photography Workshop” and the hotel runs bespoke photography courses for groups. The owners later expanded the hotel into the long derelict Hotel de Provence on the nearby main boulevard around the town. With the large new wing came an expansive garden and new luxury facilities; suites, a larger pool, a sushi restaurant, even a tree house.


We stayed in a room like this. Standard rooms are from 165€ per night.
(Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Les Ateliers de l’image )


Superior rooms start from 300€ per night depending on season.
(Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Les Ateliers de l’image )


The Treehouse Suite is 300€ off season but I cannot say whether it might be bit draughty then!
(Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Les Ateliers de l’image )


The lovely cocktail bar set inside the old cinema music hall building.
We enjoyed fabulous glasses with Baileys in crushed ice here on our honeymoon.


At weekends, they still show films in the cocktail bar.
Above the screen you can see what was previously the projectionist’s gallery.
(Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Les Ateliers de l’image )


Ephemera from the hotel’s past remains; flip up cinema seating….


…and old movie cameras.


The new swimming pool. A private area surrounded by trees. Nice cold drinks to hand.


The terrace outside the cocktail bar looking towards the pool area.

A tunnel underneath leads from the road to the car park so not to upset the tranquility of the garden. >As well as photographers, the hotel is also popular with American cycle tours using it as a base whilst they explore the rest of Provence. Should you find that Les Ateliers de L’Image is fully booked when you want to stay, there is another way you can access their pool and garden. Guests staying at nearby Bed & Breakfast, La Maison du Village, are able to enjoy these facilities at Ateliers de L’Image for a supplementary fee of around 10€.

Violette Suite at La Maison du Village
Photo reproduced with permission of La Maison du Village

We stayed one night at La Maison du Village back in June this year, this time with our 2 year old son. La Maison du Village is a beautiful old French house in the heart of the town. Rooms have huge high ceilings and period furniture. We were amused that our son had this huge room above, in their Violette Suite to himself whilst we were next door in the smaller adjoining room. (We chose there as it had the television and we’d not disturb him using the bathroom!).
Ted in the garden at La Maison du Village.


A very pretty breakfast table at La Maison du Village. Croissants and pastries arrived moments later. >Breakfast was served outside in the garden. A typical Provencal setting with curvy iron furniture, a tinkling fountain and dappled light filtering through the trees. Ted was a little obsessed with the stones on the floor wanting to arrange them on the tables and the giant glass hurricane lamps made us a little nervous he might fall and hurt himself near one. Toddlers and beautiful things do not really mix…


The tea room at Hotel Ville Verte
Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Ville Verte

The last place I will share with you today is Hotel Ville Verte which stands on the corner of a square where the Wednesday market is held. The interiors of Ville Verte are highly decorative and definitely not child friendly. Their website even holds the intriuguing warning, “Careful! for security reasons no babies or children or extra person are accepted in the rooms.” It says elsewhere that the hotel is not “adapted” for children although I think you would get away with a well behaved 8 year old.

We stayed here for around five nights back in 2005. Their room rates are very reasonable 145€ considering the standard of the furnishings and the fact that Ville Verte is also one of the few places other than Ateliers de l’image with a pool and private parking in the centre of town. Our room had stone coloured toile de juoy soft furnishings and a little balcony.

Breakfast is served in the tea room downstairs and it does feel a little like the set for Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette with constant piped opera playing – possibly Gounod’s “Mireille” which was composed during his stay in the building. Amusing on day one, the tone of the tea room can grate towards the end of your stay – although the rooms, pool and service were faultless.


Teatime treats at Hotel Ville Verte
Photo reproduced with permission of Hotel Ville Verte

I will leave you now with a few street scenes of St Rémy… the Eglise St Martin…

Streets near La Musee des Alpilles. The channel down the middle carries water through the town.

Restaurant table at Xa

Me, sitting in restaurant, La Gousse d’Ail.

Not sure that lead would pass health and safety in the UK…

Nostradamus fountain

The joy of St Rémy for me is that such a little place should be stuffed with so much to look at. I haven’t touched on the shops, restaurants, museums and galleries nor history. I struggle to find a comparative destination in the UK and can think of only St Ives, Cornwall which shares an artistic legacy and also has narrow streets filled with artists galleries and shops.

I hope you have enjoyed this little trip to France. I expect this will become an occasional series when I am too ill to cook but can share my tourist tips from my favourite destinations.

Nearest airports: Nimes – Ryanair (We flew for a ridiculous £8 return from London Luton) Marseille – Easyjet, British Airways, Air France (flights from London Gatwick) Montpellier – Easyjet, British Airways, Air France (flights from London Gatwick) 
Trains: TGV stops in Avignon and Arles. No station in St Rémy. I recommend hiring a car. Buses to St Rémy from Avignon are few and far between. 

Need more travel tips for Provence, Cote d’Azur or elsewhere in France? Email me and see if I’ve been there!

The view from Mont Ventoux

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Mont Ventoux is the highest point in Provence and quite possibly the highest place, bar a skiing trip to Meribel, that I have been. Situated 20km north east of Carpentras in the Vaucluse département, it was a little way off from our usual stamping grounds of St-Remy-de-Provence and The Camargue and it took six or seven trips to the area before we visited.

1912 metres at the peak, Mistral wind speeds of 200mph have been recorded there, hence the name Ventoux which means “windy” in French.  Locally nicknamed “The Bald Mountain”, the bare terrain is a memorable stage in the annual Tour de France cycle race.  A website showing daily webcam conditions of the area is called Cycling on the moon.

We cheated and drove up there. Although a very pleasant September day, it was very cold at the top and during winter would often be covered in snow. Mont Ventoux is geologically part of the Alps but has no similar size peaks around it and stands alone. The view, it goes without saying, is breathtaking.

Cucuron and the outdoor cinema scene from A Good Year

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This post was previously published on Maison Cupcake.

Whether it’s on TV or film, every now and again, the glimpse of somewhere I’ve been before pictured on screen fills me with excitement. Daniel Craig walking down the street where I used to work in Layer Cake. An obscure Tim Roth movie filmed in and around Southgate tube station. Borough Market in Bridget Jones’ Diary.

Sometimes it’s the other way round. I see somewhere on screen and am determined to seek it out and go there myself to feel a little of the magic I felt when watching. Working out which French beach featured the wooden chalets on stilts in Betty Blue with no internet took some detective work I can tell you. (It’s Gruissan near Narbonne in the Languedoc region)

About 4 years ago, in the closing titles of 80s detective series Bergerac on UK Gold, I saw a picture of the plane tree lined pool shown below. Not many people remember that the closing series relocated to Provence rather than its usual Jersey. I have holidayed in Provence many times and was intrigued by this pool which was shown at the very end of each episode. How come I’d never seen it in a tourist guide or on my travels? Where on earth was it?

I was determined to find it, not because Bergerac, my pregnancy craving at the time (others dip Cheerios in ketchup; I watched endless episodes of Bergerac and did 3 Sudoku puzzles per day but have done neither before or since, honest) had been filmed there but out of my quest to know every corner of Provence.

Shortly afterwards I saw my Provencal pool onscreen once more. It was featured in what was to become my favourite film ever, Ridley Scott’s romantic comedy A Good Year starring Russell Crowe and Marion Cottilard. Now this film did not go down well with critics and you’ll probably find more people admitting to liking Bergarac than the film but I know from conversations on Twitter that at least three people, including Juls share my love of it.

Image via bastidequest.wordpress.com

Even freakier, Max (Russell Crowe) has inherited Jim Bergerac’s new house, this gorgeous bastide – Chateau la Canorgue in the Luberon. That’s just spooky.

Happily, locations in the film are much easier to research than a random film still in one series of Bergerac‘s closing titles and I soon deduce that the Provencal pool is in Cucuron, an understated village north of Aix en Provence with no other claim to fame. I conspired to visit during my weekend in St Remy de Provence. We drove there on the Sunday after visiting the busy brocante at L’Isle sur la Sorgue.

We drove to Cucuron and discovered the sleepiest of Provencal villages. Streets were deserted. Saucepans belonging to vielle madames clattered as we passed kitchen windows. Cats barely lifted eyelids to look at us. There was no sign of a square with this huge pool centre stage which had accommodated an orchestra and outdoor cinema showing clips like Charles Trenet singing Boum where Max and Fanny kiss after everyone else has bolted in the rain storm.

Eventually, on the point of giving up, we found a map marking L’Etang and tucked away in a corner we found the pool with a couple of cafes and sat down for our less romantic glass of Sprite and an ice cream next to the local fire station (odd… they disguised this in the film).

Sadly I can’t find clips to embed due to copyright… You can pick up copies of A Good Year for £3.99 on dvd. If you like France, you will enjoy it.