Welcome to France!

We arrived Saturday morning in Nice, France and (after an unexpected wait) met with our first house exchanger.  We briefly exchanged information and took off with her car to drive up the coast to our first location, Chateaurenard - about 15 kilometers south of Avignon, 60 km or so north of Marseilles - right in the center of the Cote du Rhone and Provence with terrific access to fabulous places.

Our first adventure was to try to find the house.  We found the town with no difficulties (thanks to Google) but it let us down on the in-town directions.  There are many traffice circles - basically everywhere we would have put a traffic light, they put a traffic circle - quite efficient, but Google wasn't really up to the task to directing us through it.  We ended up in Centre Ville and I approached a nice lady and declared in French that "I had lost myself."  She was just closing her shop and taking off on the back of her husband's motorcycle.  They were about our age.  She first asked everyone othe street where the street we were looking for was - then told me to follow her.  They led us around town, up and down until we stopped again to ask for directions of the man who runs the marble store right next to the cemetery.  While we waited for him to go produce a map, her husband described for me the festival of St. Eloi which was to take place the next morning and insisted that we walk into town for it.  Eventually, we located the house (they led us right to it and wished us good luck.)