The wife of the couple that owns the hotel was at the desk in the morning and showed us that an ATM was available right next to the Laundromat. It wasn’t long before we had all the clean clothes we needed to get us to Florence.
The other bit of business we wanted to take care of was getting our train tickets for Nice. Instead of walking back along the river, we went into town and did a little more exploring on our way to the station. We were also still on the lookout for the kind of bright fabrics that Provence is known for. We had Meghan’s blue/green decorating plan in mind, but everything we saw had lots of yellow in it. That applied to ceramics as well.
I believe the center of Arles could fit within the walls of Avignon, though the history of Arles predominance in the region predates Avignon’s. When Julius Caesar was preparing to attack Marseilles, the city’s ship builders were able to provide him with 12 new ships in just 3 weeks. After his victory, Caesar named the city a special city of the Roman Republic in gratitude. His nephew, Octavian, stayed behind in France while Caesar went back to Rome to defeat the Republic and establish the Roman Empire. Later, when he was Caesar August, Octavian made Arles an official Roman city – which conferred Roman citizenship on its inhabitants – to honor his uncle. Until the French Revolution, Arles owned more property than any other city in France.
The rest of the day – when we weren’t sitting in a café – we just wandered around. We decided that we’d do the walking tour on Friday and visit all the Easel sights as well. It was dark when we started walking back to our hotel after dinner and, since we were near it, we stopped at the Starry Night over the Rhone Easel. After taking a picture of the Easel, we both took pictures of the river with streetlights and a few stars reflection off of it.