Next week we move on to Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer, Toulon, and perhaps the best pizza on the planet. Until then, here is today’s Fun Photo Friday favorites of Aigues-Mortes, France:





Next week we move on to Saint-Mandrier-sur-Mer, Toulon, and perhaps the best pizza on the planet. Until then, here is today’s Fun Photo Friday favorites of Aigues-Mortes, France:
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Filed under Fun Photo Friday, Photography, R. Doug Wicker, travel, vacation
Don’t let the quaint exterior of Notre-Dame-des-Sablons Church deter you from stepping inside. We’ll take a look at that in a moment, but first I must apologize. The lighting inside Notre-Dame-des-Sablons is low and the color hideous. As such, I had to shoot in JPEG with the camera set in handheld night mode, which gave me adequate shutter speeds but made color correction almost impossible. Here’s an example of what I mean.
Yuck, right? Sorry about that. Still, not all the interior shots came out quite so tainted.
Still, it’s a shame that flash photography is not allowed here. That might have helped, but I understand that electronic flashes are distracting to others, and may cause damage to ancient artifacts.
I’ll just photo gallery the rest of today’s interior shots, and then we’ll move on to Place Saint Louis (Saint Louis Plaza) just outside the church:
Okay, now that I have my hideous photography out of the way (again, my apologies), let’s head on out to Saint Louis Plaza. It’s here that you’ll find the social center of this walled city, with many cafés and restaurants surrounding a park-like setting:
In the center of the plaza you’ll find a statue of King Louis IX, also known as Saint Louis:
Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini!)
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We completed our transatlanitic cruise aboard Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas, docking in Barcelona on 13 May 2022. After a hike to our favorite Barcelona restaurant, we hoofed it back to Vision of the Seas to begin an eight-day Mediterranean cruise that would take us to some French and Spanish destinations not usually associated with a Mediterranean cruise. And so it was that the next day, 14 May, we arrived at the French port of Sète. We would not be there for long, however, as Ursula had us scheduled for a tour of a different destination — the medieval walled city of Aigues-Mortes.
We approached Aigues-Mortes from the north, where we alighted from our tour bus near the Tour de Constance built between 1242 and 1254:
Tour de Constance stands outside the city walls, and is joined to those walls via a bridge across what I assume was once a moat:
Stepping through the Porte de la Gardette (Gardette Gate) doesn’t exactly transport you back in time, but it does give one a striking contradiction in which vendors of modern amenities and products coexist within a fortress dating back to the 13th century.
So, let’s start cruising the streets of Aigues-Mortes until we get to Place Saint Louis (Saint Louis Plaza) with it’s many restaurants and cafés until we eventually reach the Porte des Moulins (Mills Gate) on the southwest wall:
Слава Україні! (Slava Ukraini!)
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Filed under Photography, R. Doug Wicker, travel, vacation