On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Aigues-Mortes is only vaguely in Provence (like being vaguely pregnant). Wiki lists it as 56 miles northwest of Marseilles. Nevertheless, it is very much of a southeastern feel and culture alongside Provence. It’s a picturesque as Carcassonne, without the crazy tourism, at least in the 70’s.
Also Aigues-Mortes.
Camargue.
Barge on a canal in the southwest.
Anne-Marie having breakfast in our hotel room.
My take on Venice tourism, circa 1970.
Strange juxtaposition just off the Piazza San Marco.
A Venice back alley.
JeanneT
Wonderful sense of place in each photo. I’m really grabbed by the Venice alley shot – that’s just amazing!
Amir Khalid
Which aircraft carrier is that?
Geminid
After his second term as President, Ullysses Grant went on a world tour, and one of his stops was Venice. Grant said of the city: Venice would be a nice enough place, if it were drained.
One biographer cited this comment as evidence of Grant’s practical common sense. Most commenters take it as an example of Grant’s low, crude intellect. But Grant had a dry, ironic sense of humor, and liked to puncture pretension. He probably was poking fun at the extravagant praise of Venice by others, and rattling the aesthetes’ cages.
Thank you for the pictures. I’ve forwarded them to several friends, to cheer them up on a rainy morning.
MagdaInBlack
Love the undies on the clothes lines =-)
Venice has always been on my list.
raven
@Amir Khalid: It’s a helicopter carrier and those don’t look to be US choppers.
Lapassionara
These are lovely. Thank you for sharing them with us.
Albatrossity
Wonderful places, and these shots elicited some memories for me as well. We visited Aigues-Mortes in 2005, and it was still a lovely un-touristy spot at that time. As I recall, that tower in your picture was built over a tower constructed by Charlemagne.
Sloane Ranger
Lovely pictures. Took me back to various past visits to Venice. Props for avoiding all the crowded touristy places.
I have a holiday booked in Provence in June this year. I’m waiting to see if I will be able to go. It’s been postponed three times already.
Steve from Mendocino
@Amir Khalid: LOL. No idea. I’m just the photographer. I wander around and point my camera at things that strike me as cool. Presumably Italian navy.
WaterGirl
Wonderful pictures. So charming.
Kattails
Lovely photos, but why does your hotel room look like a tent ;-) South of France is one area of the world I really have wanted to visit.
Looking at that laundry, you really don’t want to fumble when pulling it off the line.
Balloon Juice full service blog: “those don’t look to be US choppers”. We have people here who actually know that.
MelissaM
Oh, to have your underwear swinging over a Venetian canal! (Ok, I think I’d dry mine inside.)
I wanna travel again!
JanieM
Oh my, these are wonderful. I don’t even know where to start with the pictures, each one is so vivid and all in different ways. The laundry reminds me of seeing clotheslines strung from old stone ruins in Ireland on my first trip. As a youngish American, I found the offhand treatment of such ancient structures surprising. Life goes on, apparently, and wherever you are becomes the everyday.
J R in WV
@raven:
Italy had no aircraft carriers in the 1970s, so it must be another nation’s ship in the Med at the time. Spain? Britain? Doesn’t look British, their ships sparkle with clean on port calls.
WaterGirl
@MelissaM: My first thought was that I would first hang a safety net beneath my real clothes. The idea of a favorite anything dropping into the canal was disturbing. I lost my favorite t-shirt ever on a boat in a lake, never to be found again, and for some reason I have never forgotten it.
way2blue
Tent-like hotels rooms! Never knew… On our honeymoon, my husband & I car-camped our way around France & Switzerland. And would have ‘disagreements’ each evening about whether to pitch the rain-fly (me being the boy scout of course). In France, a little truck would circle the campground in the morning with fresh croissants. Of course. In Switzerland, beer was stowed in a small brook that ran through the campground—in those reusable glass bottles with ceramic ‘corks’. Thanks for jogging my memories on a drizzly morning.
John Revolta
@Geminid: Grant’s remark has a definite dry Twainishness to it. One can see why they got along.
John Revolta
@Geminid: It’s definitely a dry, Twainesque kind of remark. It’s easy to see why the two men got along so well.
WaterGirl
@John Revolta: Wondering if you got my email?
Unless you did something terrible that I am unaware of :-) someone must have hit “trash & ban” by mistake, because I found several messages from you in the trash, and you were marked “banned”.
I un-banned you and released your original comment, and deleted all your “test” comments.