Travel Day today, heading from Interlaken back into France to Avignon. 6 hours today on the bus with a few stops along the way for toilet stops and lunch. This gave us plenty of time to kill so a Men Vs Women challenge was began. No this wasn't a fight to see who was stronger sex, but the smarter sex, the task was for both teams to create 20 questions of anything they liked, and then answer the most of the opposing teams questions. The woman had some extremely good questions and us guys had a tough time answering them, thank goodness Ryan seemed to know woman's clothing. At the end of the rounds we waited for the telly up, the women seemed confident they had won, and to be fair, us guys thought they might have as well, however... It was a tie, so... down to a tie breaker question: "How far will the tour bus have travelled in total over the entire tour", with the closest answer being right, the men guessed 16,500km, where the women guessed 26,538km, how they came to that specific distance I don't know. In the end, we were both wrong, but somehow the women were WAY over. The proper answer was about 13,000km. After our 31 minute stop for lunch and loos it was on our way to Avignon. From 1309 to 1377 Avignon became the home to the Catholic popes, and remained under papal rule until becoming part of France in 1791, with the town centre being surrounded by medieval stone walls, this city has the oldest remaining wall of medieval times. We arrived at our nights accommodation and while it was in a nice area with amazing views next to Le Rhône river, it wasn't the greatest accommodation that we had stayed at. Smelly toilets, showers that you have to hold onto the shower head and tile floors throughout the entire building so the place acts like a giant echo chamber and you can hear everyone walking around and doors slamming shut, but on the plus side, we are in a great location. We took a walk into the main centre of Avignon and looked around the streets before the group separated off and we did our own things, a few of us headed into Palais des Papes, the accommodation of the Popes of the time. Looking around it was astounding to see just the amount of time it must have taken to build the place, the walls were plane stone and while in the time of the pipes they were all covered in beautiful tapestries, these were all torn down when Napoleon invaded as he uses the place as a prison. Beautiful artwork had been covered with plaster and is slowly being restored by the plaster being removed. Due to the lack of time available we only had enough time to make it to the top of the Palace and overlook the city, we didn't have enough time to get to the remains of the old bridge which just looks stunning coming out half way across the river. We found our way into the local town square and decided to get a quick meal before meeting up with the others, we all decided to get steaks, and while you would generally expect them to be similar in shape, they were fairly inconsistent, bones in some, no bones in others, medium rare was more like well done, and rare was fine. We asked for some water only to have a 5 euro bottle each brought to our table, while it works out at NZ$8.40 it was a pretty tasty bottle, not fully happy with the meals, we paid up and headed off to the supermarket to get some snacks a couple of bottles of red wine and headed to the Le Rhóne river to meet the others for a picnic. A great way to finish off the evening overlooking Avignon drinking some red wine and eating crackers and cheese, while it was a little cold as the sun had gone down and the wind was picking up, it was still nice to just chill out (excuse the pun) and chat to the others.