It’s not often that the word little (petite) is used in the same sentence with Carcassonne. After all, with 3 kilometers (nearly 2 miles) of double walls surrounding it, we’re more likely to see descriptions including “Europe’s largest medieval walled city” or “giant fortress”  or even “most formidable fortified city”. That reputation has attracted up to 3 million visitors during an exceptionally busy year, half of whom were from nearby Spain. Historically, it’s that proximity to our former adversary, now ally to the south that required the construction of those protective walls. In fact there’s a string of fortifications along the French/Spanish border that provided security to this area for hundreds of years, including one in the village of Camon, also known as “La petite Carcassonne”.

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Although Vichy has been on our “must visit” list for years, I was reluctant to go because of the city’s connection to Nazi Germany. French Marshal Philippe Pétain, leading an autocratic government during World War II, dismantled the democratic institutions of the French Third Republic and consolidated power by creating a cult of personality around himself. His government, based in Vichy, collaborated with Hitler’s regime by imposing a police state controlled by censorship and propaganda. Luckily that ended 80 years ago, leaving behind a city where the painful memories of that era remain, but the beautiful Belle Époque architecture endures.

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Both of us were convinced that we’d already visited Aix-en-Provence, most likely on a quick visit to the area years ago. We’d been on a sleepless overnight flight from NY to Paris, a speedy train south, and still under the influence of jetlag early the next morning, a rail trip out into the countryside of Provence. As always, we took lots of photos but it was only upon returning to the US while reviewing our vacation pictures did we realize that we’d been to Arles and Avignon but not to that third “A” town, Aix. To remedy that, we scheduled a return stay in Marseille as home base with a bonus boat ride to the National Park of the Calanques.

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