Coco & JC en voyage: Bits and pieces

Well, time does fly and you blink your eyes and you are back in Portland! We arrived home tired and content...it was a great holiday for us!
So now bear with me...I took many photos of the last day or two in Provence and of course many of them have to do with....markets! Okay, you can stop right here if you have had enough market views but if not here goes!

On Sunday there is usually a big market in Isle sur Sorgue which I pictured in last spring's posts so we piled Maya into the car and drove over to spend the morning wandering around and riding on the spaceship merry go round.

We had to greet her friend Gerard the swan who swam right up to her in greeting along with his coterie of mallards

The market was quite nice, much less crowded than in the summer and in fact many of the little bistros we like to stop in were closed until spring.

Luckily the patissier/boulanger was not and we got some croissants and pain aux raisins to nibble while we walked.

January is the time for galette des rois or king's cake for epiphany so it was not unusual to see displays in many of the bakery windows like this.

Some of the newer crowns have Star Wars characters on them???? And the little bean figurine inside the cake could be Yoga or R2D2 or someone like that!!?? Hmmm.

I liked some of the other window displays in town too...very elegant zebra butterfly chair.

What about this great display of tights outside the shop door

In this next series of photos can you tell what is the focus of the shop?

All those decorative little colorful pieces are actually candied fruit, melons, pumpkins etc. They all look like blown glass but are actually edible...pretty sweet though.

Sitting in the park by the merry go round were two clowns just having a chat...don't know if you can see them but so unexpected!

We picked up some mimosa which was out in the flower stand. The vendor said that all the blooms were about a month early this year.

Monday was our last day in town so we went to pick up Maya at school and waited patiently with all the other parents and grandparents at the gate.

We then went to Jouvaud for hot chocolate and a wonderful croissant.

They also had huge meringues on the counter.

It is such a wonderful patissier and we came home with dessert for dinner.

The Wonder Woman costume I had been working on for a week was finally complete and it was time to pack our suitcases.

Tuesday we headed to the TGV station in Avignon for the trip to Paris.

I love the TGV station there...looks more like a sort of space station I think and very sculptural. It also feels very calm.

This fellow was the shoe shine man and had blue hair...reminded me of those painted wood ducks!

We had great seats on the train and had parting views of the Pope's Palace and the Rhone river as we pulled out of the station.

By the time we got to Lyon it was raining but Paris weather was clear so that was nice. We walked through the airport and saw some Christmas lights still glowing.