Rome had the Gaul to leave tons of Roman-related sights around southern France, and a couple of the best ones are in the city of Nimes. After breakfast, we took the thirty-minute train to Nimes to see what we would see.

Beauty, actually. As soon as we left the train station, we walked onto a wide, tree-lined pedestrian way that ran over half a mile to a square with a fountain, and although the fountain was off for the winter, the long artificial stream running the entire length of the pedestrian way was still full of water. Since train stations are not always in the most scenic part of the town, the welcome-to-Nimes was pretty special.

As soon as we got to the dry fountain, which in itself was fun to look at, with sculptures all around, we could see the amphitheater we had come to see (Dubbs says NEVER to call an amphitheater a coliseum since that is the one in Rome). The coliseum in Nimes is the best preserved one in the world, since it was used as a fortress for much of the post-Roman history of the town. It is one of the twenty biggest, seating 24,000 spectators when it was built. Once again, we mostly had the place to ourselves. Other than a few workers, the entire place only had three or four other tourists in it, and they mostly were on the other side of the arena.

We had audioguides, which presented a description of typical gladiatorial games – highly anticipated combats that crowds loved, but that rarely ended in the death of the gladiator – gladiators were too expensive to train, and if one died, the sponsor had to pay a large sum of money to the school from which the gladiator came. The audioguides also had us climbing all over the place, to the point where we found ourselves climbing a ridiculously small staircase that came out on the top wall and top seats. We chose the seats and not the no-railing wall. The view was spectacular, with the coliseum in the foreground, the for-Christmas Ferris wheel behind, and a church steeple behind. All in all, we spent almost an hour and a half tromping around the place.

On to the next Roman ruin! Or not-so-ruined. We went on to the Maison Carree (“square house”) a few blocks away. The Maison Carree is the best preserved Roman temple in the world, again, because it has been in continuous use – as a church, a house, a storage barn, and more. The temple was dedicated to Caesar Augustus’ grandsons, and is, as far as I can tell, completely intact. There used to be other buildings all around the temple, but they are gone. The temple now shows a short film on the founding and Roman history of Nimes. The short version – the Celtic people who lived here chose to support Julius Caesar in his wars against the northern Gauls. They picked the winning side, and were granted status as a Roman colony, with Roman citizenship available to important members of the city.

It was a beautiful day today, so we sprang to eat on the terrace of the cafe at the museum that overlooks the Maison Carree. The food was fussy to my taste, but I ate Dubbs’ potatoes and had dessert, all while getting to look at the temple in the pretty square. The meal was pricey, but we were paying for the experience, and it was worth it.

We next headed toward Jardin de la Fontaine (the Fountain Garden). We got a good approach, walking along the canal that exits the garden, and so we got to see the garden unfold as we came up to it. The town was named from the name of the deity of the spring here, which should give you an indication of the amount of water we are taking about. This is not a fill-up-your-bottle kind of spring – it is a full lagoon, multiple pools, and running canal kind of gushing supply of water. All of this is at the base of a good-sized hill, so the gardens run up the slope. It is one of the prettiest urban parks I have ever seen. And it also has a Roman ruin at the bottom and at the top of the hill.

The “Temple of Diana” is a ruined hall of some kind that scientists agree was not dedicated to Dianna and was almost certainly not a temple. It is from the first century, and is still striking, and so was fun to explore. Then came the trek up the hill, which was not a small walk. At the top was the Magne Tower, a Roman tower that was once the highest point along the seven-kilometer wall around the city. The tower has lost the top story since it was built, but is still climbable inside, and gives a grand view of the city.

Back down the hill, through the amazing park, and back into the center (with a pause in a park to watch old men play boules, the French version of bocce, followed by a detour for pastry near the Maison Carree), all the way back to the coliseum, and to the Musee de la Romanite (the Museum of the Romans). The Musee tells the story of Nimes from the pre-Roman time up through the Middle Ages, with a long focus on the Romans, in chronological order.

It is an excellent little museum, combining two-thousand-year-old artifacts with modern technology. So they had mosaics, which were impressive, but then they would project close-up images of parts of the mosaic, or they would project in the missing parts of a fresco on a wall. On inscriptions, they would use projectors to deepen the contrast on the marble, to make it easier to read, and provided a translation (in French) under the Latin. They had a wonderful topographical map onto which they projected Nimes, showing the town at different times through the centuries (it shrank down for much of the post-Roman period). Finally, there was a display where you were virtually dressed in Roman garb, but it was done automatically. I may have appeared as a first-century woman on a screen. Fun museum.

That ended the evening in Nimes, and we caught the train back to Avignon, where we got take-away food from a food stall. We figured we had eaten “classy” at lunch. Too many meals like that and we could be ruined.

Breaking up is hard to do, unless you have a ton of resources at your back. From roughly 1300 to 1400, the Pope and his supporting bureaucracy moved the Papacy from Rome to Avignon. He moved because, according to the tablet-guides we used, “of political, religious, and economic reasons.” According to Dubbs, the Pope was kicked out. Either way, the Papacy was in Avignon, and the popes wanted to create a palace and supporting offices. In just twenty years, they built the old palace, and then subsequent popes kept adding on. But I get ahead of my touring self.

First, we started in the grand church next to the Popes’ Palace, Avignon’s Notre Dame. The church is very large, but not jaw-droppingly huge like St. Peter’s in Rome. It does have the advantage of being on a hill, so it has pretty views, and the golden statue of Mary on top of the church is huge, and very lovely. The interior of the church has many chapels off to each side, including one with a carved marble statue of Mary that is lit so subtly that we could not tell where the light was coming from. People were working in that chapel, setting up pews, so we could not get very close, but that was fine, since it left the lighting a mystery. One of the chapels also had a statue of Joseph holding Jesus, which is rare in my experience. There was a chapel with Mary holding the body of Jesus, and that chapel had the first black-and-white stained glass I can remember seeing, which was very appropriate for a chapel depicting the dead Jesus. Finally, there was renovation work going on near the entrance, and it made me smile that 80% of the multi-story scaffolding was hidden behind one single religious painting. That is one way to hide the work going on.

Back to the Popes’ Palace. It was home to nine popes, all of whom reigned for eight or more years; no “accidents” with this string of popes, and the election of the next popes went smoothly as well. It was not until there were competing Rome/Avignon popes elected that there were any issues, and I believe the Rome popes eventually won, ending the Avignon papacy, although the Pope did own the town itself until the French took it during the revolution in the late 1700s.

I had a first for me in touring – instead of an audio guide, we got iPad-like tablets which showed us a map of how to go through the rooms. This made my wife, who loves to see everything, very happy. Also, in each major room, there was a symbol that you could scan, and you would “time travel” back to the 1300s, and the tablet would show you what the room looked like at the time, virtually; wherever you held the tablet, it would show you that part of the room, with narration on the use of the room. It was really effective, but I had to keep reminding myself not to get so distracted with the virtual room that I forgot to look around the real room as it is now. Most rooms have lost their decorations over the last six hundred years, and most rooms had no furniture other than benches to rest on, so having the real and virtual rooms worked really well.

Some of the highlights? The treasury had hidden chambers under the flagstones for the most precious items and monies, and these floor panels were not discovered until the 1980s. It was an isolated room in the heart of the palace, and was protected by a wooden and iron door, which was still forced twice. The first time, the thieves were caught before they stole anything. The guide did not mention anything about the second time, so I assume they got away with some valuables.

There was a huge hall that was used for banquets. The Pope and the cardinals sat up front on seats, and any lowly visitors, like ambassadors and nobility, had to share benches down the hall. No one was allowed to leave until an inventory of the goldware and silverware was completed.

There was a pretty little chapel off the dining hall that was lavishly decorated with the story of a local saint. Someone decided later it would be a perfect room for a lead-smelting furnace, with a chimney through the roof. Happily, somehow, much of the decoration survived.

The large main chapel, used for important services during the church year, and for ceremonies like the election of a new pope, held an art exhibit of realistic drawings of (mostly) men, usually inspired by religious themes. They wore modern dress, and the artist hung the drawings on the sides of buildings all around the world and photographed the works and sometimes people viewing the work. It was very effective.

The tour ended on top of one of the towers of the palace, so we had grand views. Sadly, out of season in November, the rooftop cafe was closed, but we again enjoyed the entire palace with usually only two or four other people around. That was very useful in a few of the smaller rooms.

We were channeled though the gift shop, of course, and while Dubbs was picking out a few things for Christmas gifts, a tour group leader started asking Meredith some questions about where groups came out. Mer answered them as best she could, and only later did the woman come up and tell Mer that she’d thought that Mer worked there. Mer just has that kind of air of authority from years of teaching.

So, thumbs up to a great tour of the Popes’ Palace. Even after six hundred years and multiple uses by various groups, it is still very impressive (and huge – we saw relatively little of it, even though we took three hours).

After a quick detour home to regroup, and a leisurely lunch, we headed over to the remains of the Avignon St. Benezet bridge. It was the first bridge built across the very large and very powerful Rhone river, built, according to legend, by the inspiration of the 12th century shepherd boy Benezet (Benedict), who claimed that God told him to get the people of Avignon to build a bridge. They laughed at him, and told him if God told him to build it, then he should pick up a huge bolder and carry it down the river to start the bridge, which he promptly did. Alternatively, historians think Benezet may have been a 12th century entrepreneur who started a bridge guild to make money. Either way, the bridge got started, and was worked on, on and off, for several hundred years, and sections were washed away on a regular basis. Many historians think the bridge was never fully completed in stone, and by the late 1600s, the bridge was not rebuilt. Four arches still remain, along with the gatehouse and drawbridge. The views from the end of the bridge are very pretty, both looking up the river, and looking back at the town. The views down river mostly are occupied by the much newer car bridge.

We got our art museum fix of the day by going to the very small Musee Angladon. It is a collection of art from the 1800s and 1900s, with a few big names like Degas and Van Gogh in the exhibit. The collection was donated from the estate of a wealthy fashion designer from the early 20th century. There were only about eight or ten rooms of a few paintings each, which made the museum easy to see, even at an easy pace. We were there for slightly less than an hour.

We finished the evening by doing a back-street walk though the twilight of Avignon. It started at a swanky hotel, where we got tea (and hot chocolate) and pastries, while getting to listen to a piano and violin duet. It was lovely and relaxing. The rest of the walk was through small lanes and back streets, past a pretty church and Avignon’s one synagogue, and ending near a water wheel in what used to be a cloth-makers’ street where there had once been 22 water wheels. On the way back to a restaurant to get supper, we stumbled across a cat cafe, so we all fawned over the kitties on the other side of the window for several minutes.

Supper was at a good crepe place, and we were the only customers until the last five minutes we were there. We enjoyed our food, but oddly, the staff had one song on repeat, so we heard a 40s-style French singer over and over and over and over. As background music went, it was fine, but hearing it about fifteen times or more was getting a little old by the end.

That ended a solid day of touring in Avignon. Mer has put me in charge of the next two days, so the pressure is on to find fun and interesting things to do, even without the resources of the papacy behind me. Here is to more touring!

Late November is definitely off-season for tourism in the south of France. Add to that the fact that many businesses close on Mondays, and there can be some challenges because of this. But the off-season also brings some spectacular opportunities that you would never see in July.

We are staying in the town of Avignon, but we took a short train ride to Arles. Mer and I had been there before, back during our tour-the-whole-country trip with Mer’s parents in 2007. On that trip, we had been moving every day, which limited touring opportunities. Then, we only remember seeing the city’s excellent Roman coliseum, and that was pretty much it.

Today, we had the entire day. We walked in from the train station, pausing to look at the Rhone River, which is a working river with lots of large boats. We strolled into the winding streets of the old city center, and Mer remembered the hotel where we stayed back in 2007, and she was right (of course). The first real stop of the day was the coliseum.

Arles was an important Roman city, both for trade purposes and for supporting the winning side in Julius Caesar’s power struggle. For both, they were rewarded with Roman buildings, like a circus for racing chariots, a forum, a 20,000-seat coliseum, and a 10,000-seat theater. The coliseum is amazingly well preserved, and is still in use today for sporting events.

We bought a “Liberty Card” at the gate, which lets you get into four different sites and two museums, all for a price lower than seeing two things. Here is where the off-season fun began. We walked into the arena, and, other than one worker working in the nosebleed seats, we had the entire arena to ourselves. And two cats. Other people did come in later, but for a good ten minutes, we were all alone in the entire site. And, even after we ran into other people, it was a total of three tourists, in a place that can still seat thousands. It was pretty great. We sat up as high as the pubic is allowed for tourism, which is about halfway up the existing seats. That was followed by walking three quarters of the way around the place, and that led us to the medieval tower that can be climbed. During the Middle Ages, the coliseum was converted into a small walled town, with two hundred houses and four defensive towers. One of the towers is open to the public, and offers great views of the countryside. Since Dubbs (our friend Ami) teaches Latin, she was geeking out. A little.

On to the next site! We walked a short way down to St. Trophime Church, which is a twelfth-century building with an intact Romanesque facade that is crammed full of carvings of people on Judgement Day, and is open to a cute square with an obelisk in it. The interior of the church is worth seeing too, with multiple side chapels and several good works of art. We met a very friendly man who explained to Meredith the symbolism of a sailor’s cross (in French), and then Mer translated the gist. He was kind for taking the time to help us; I think he worked for the church in some maintenance capacity, but he was happy to talk with us.

From the church, we walked around the corner to the associated cloisters, which were included on our Liberty Card. The cloisters had an enclosed green space (formerly used as a graveyard), and was a quiet and pretty place to be. The covered walkways were heavily carved with statues depicting Bible stories and some local legends. In a surprise to us, the cloisters had three exhibits on creche (nativity) scenes – one room by talented amateurs, one room by professional artists, and one by artists from Mozambique. I liked creches from all three rooms – some were carved, some were done with needlework, one used gourds, and one was even made of tasteful finger puppets. We took the time to look at all of them.

After a quick lunch, we walked though a maze-like series of streets to soak up the atmosphere of the local town, on our way out to the Ancient History Museum on the edge of town. The lanes we saw were wonderful and cute and very effective in turning us around. We came out of them with no real idea where the river was and where the museum would be. Dubbs rescued us with her phone, which promptly sent us through a slightly dodgy neighborhood which seemed to have too many adults sitting around on a Monday afternoon. We did find the museum, however, and that was good.

The museum started with Arles pre-Roman, but someone (who teaches Latin) wanted to move efficiently along to the Romans. The museum excels there – probably eighty percent of the museum or more is Roman-related. They have excellent models of the whole town in different centuries, and ones of the coliseum, the circus, the forum, and the theater, all laid out in their (best-guess) original splendor. They have tons of pots, a bunch of sculptures, several mosaic floors with a suspended walkway to see them, and many sarcophagi from the early Christian period, but the showstopper is a 2,000-year-old river boat.

Archaeologists found the boat in the river in the early 2,000s, and the boat was largely intact. So began a several-year process of figuring out how to raise the boat (after cutting it into ten sections) and how to preserve the boat for initial prepping and for the long term; that involved soaking in resin and then exposing it to gamma radiation to cure any metal parts like nails. The boat was painstakingly put back together, and is now well housed in the museum, surrounded by objects recovered around the boat from the river excavations. It was pretty great getting to see the scale of the vessel, and they even had it partially loaded with the original cargo of rocks.

It was easier to find the river path for the fifteen-minute walk back into the city center. We were still in time to see the ruins of the Roman theater; admission was still on our Liberty Card. Yay, us! The theater is not in so good a condition as the coliseum, but is still excellent, and the theater is still used as such – it still has seating for 6,000, although most of those seats came from an 1800s renovation. The original Roman seats only go up eight or nine rows, but the original space in front of the stage still exists, as does one set of columns for the stage wall. There are lots of ruins around as well to give visitors some idea of the size of the backstage buildings.

The last free-to-us site was the underground Cryptoporticos, which were the support structures for the forum buildings. This one was a tad disappointing in that it is just a really really long and empty cellar. And old cellar, but just a cellar.

After checking out the Forum Square, which has the “Night Cafe” made famous by Van Gogh, and then looking around a small church next to a scenic overlook, we finished our evening in Arles with a good meal at an open restaurant that we stumbled upon on our way back to the train station. The downside of off-season travel on Mondays showed up when the first two restaurants we tried to find today were both closed, as was the case with the crepe place AND ice cream place we wanted to go to back in Avignon. Nonetheless, it’s still worth it, even if food can be a little harder to find.

Getting to Avignon was a bit of a trek – Ohio to Toronto by car, Toronto to Reykjavik (Iceland), Reykavik to Paris, and Paris to Avignon, with layovers in between. All told, it took about 34 hours door-to-door. With the time change and travel on both ends, it turns out to be four days of traveling for four days in Provence. That, at times made me wonder if it was all worth it, and if we should have just stayed in Paris or northern France.

It was not all travel. We cleared European Union customs in Reykjavik, so getting through the airport in Paris was easy. We checked where we were going to get our high-speed train for Avignon at 5:00 pm, and still had over three hours of time, so we grabbed a taxi to head into the town area of Roissy-en-France, the Paris suburb where the airport is located. We figured we could at least grab some not-at-the-airport supper.

The little downtown area of Roissy-en-France is cute – the taxi dropped us off on a small two-block street that had a few restaurants, and we ate at a small pizza place. After supper, we explored the area some, checking out a park and a cemetery. I know cemeteries are an odd thing to visit as a tourist, but we find them interesting – there are stories to be told in them. Here, a strange number of people seemed to die on the young side – 50’s and 60’s, although there were still a surprising number of people making it into the 80’s and 90’s. There were some WW I graves, and a section set apart for about thirty WW I and WW II graves that were specially set apart as a memorial. Some of the gravestones had pictures on them, and many of the graves were heavily decorated with lots of plaques and flowers. It seems as if Europeans visit and care for graves more often than Americans do, or it is a result of having slightly-raised graves that do not require lawn care – you can decorate them if they do not have to be mowed.

We also checked out the local church, which was open but empty of people. It was a good-sized church, but fairly simple inside, and was a quiet place to visit. We finished our little tour of the town by walking along the restaurant street to the town hall, where we waited by a fountain for our Uber car to take us back to the airport.

The train trip to Avignon was uneventful, except the high-speed train had to be moved over to slower tracks because of flooding on the line from heavy rains earlier in the week. As such, we got to Avignon a little over an hour later than we were supposed to, which is not encouraging when you are trying to stay awake. But, we got here, and as we walked through the largely-deserted historic center on our way to our apartment, as we passed through the gates of the old walls of the city, I was reminded of why I do end up traveling thirty or more hours to get to places like this. Hello, Provence!

“To most people, Hans Huberman was barely visible. An un-special person…. He was always just there. Not noticeable. Not important or particularly valuable.” In the novel The Book Thief, Hans Huberman is the foster father of the main character, Liesel, and he’s not only my favorite character, but he’s also Liesel’s favorite person. The narrator explains how, to most people, he wouldn’t really stand out, yet to Liesel, his “thereness,” as the narrator puts it, is one of the key qualities she treasures in him: “The girl knew from the outset that Hans Huberman would always appear” when she needed him, “and he would not leave.”

Matthew and I adopted Skittles, along with his father Linus, from a woman whose young son had developed sudden and severe allergies. Skittles was ten at the time, and we’ve never felt right about renaming older cats. We made a slight exception with him, though, in that his given name was Skittle, singular, and between our familiarity with the candy (which always seems to be referred to in the plural) and the fact that Matthew used to have a cat named Skittles, we unconsciously kept adding an “s,” so Skittles he became. As we got to know him better, however, we didn’t so often add the “s” as drop the “tle,” generally calling him “Skit” or “Skit Kit.”

We’d been warned before adopting Skit that he was shy and might spend most of his time under our bed, so we considered it a credit to our cat-whisperer skills that he was more often on the bed than under it, and if he was under it, he’d come out to greet us when we came in the room. What we didn’t know was that, comfortable as Skit seemed in the bedroom, he’d rarely leave it in the over two years he lived with us. To our relief, he learned to go to the basement for the litterbox, and we’d occasionally spot him on the main or lower level of the house, but most of the time, he stayed upstairs, usually in the bedroom. He was always just there.

Though warned of Skit’s shyness, we weren’t told until we met him that he was somewhat crippled from a kittenhood injury. Between this and his age, he wasn’t exactly agile, but since he didn’t seem to be in discomfort, and he could still climb stairs and jump up onto the bed, we found his gimpy gait to be part of his cuteness. We realized, nonetheless, that most people probably wouldn’t regard him as too special. He’d never win any beauty competitions or become a Cover Cat. “He’s a lover, not a looker,” we’d say. Despite his generally weighing about ten pounds, normal for an adult cat, he always looked scrawny, and although we’d scritch his head all the time, we hesitated to pet his back, because it was a bit disturbing to feel his spine. He also had an odd tail, unusually wide at the base, but then, about halfway down its length, narrowing abruptly and ending in a pointed tip. His claws wouldn’t retract all the way, clicking on our hardwood floors, and the “thumb” claw was freakishly large and thick and needed to be clipped to keep it from growing back into his paw.

During his time with us, Skit actually became even less physically attractive. He grew a large bulge on one of his shoulders; the vet diagnosed it as a lipoma, a fatty tumor that was unsightly but benign, so we decided not to traumatize Skit by having it removed. Before that, we did have the vet remove a cyst on his upper lip, leading to a couple weeks of his having to wear the “Cone of Shame.” Even after he was no longer our Cone Kitty, his face still wasn’t the loveliest, as he’d scratch his chin until it was raw or even bleeding. The vet suggested that it might be a contact allergy, so we changed blankets, which appeared to help.

We got Skit in the late spring, and he stayed on the bed much of the time for those first few months, but when the temperatures dropped, he’d hunker by the register, as if trying to absorb all the heat he could. With the return of warmer weather, he returned to the bed; however, after his second winter with us, he stayed by the register even as spring and summer came. Wanting to encourage him to get back on the bed, I suggested taking away the blanket we’d put on the floor, thinking that he’d seek a softer spot … yet after a few days of his continuing to hunker on the hardwood floor, we felt bad for his aging bones and gave him the blanket once again. For about a year, we could pretty much count on his being cutely curled up on that blanket whenever we entered the room. He was always just there.

Or nearly always, at any rate. Grateful not to have to keep a litterbox upstairs, we did decide to humor Skit by bringing up a plate of canned cat food every day and by providing an upstairs bowl of water in the hall; we didn’t want to risk his dying of hunger or thirst. So Skit would regularly leave his blanket for food and water. He’d also leave it almost every night in what became an endearing ritual. He liked me but was especially fond of Matthew, and almost every night after we turned out the lights, we’d hear his clicking claws crossing the floor in a lurching, lub-dub, heartbeat rhythm, uneven because of his bad leg. Getting to the bed, he’d jump up on Matthew’s side and settle on his chest while we scritched his head and stroked his sides. These goodnight snuggles were important enough to Skit that when we were sleeping in the downstairs guest room, where it’s cooler and darker, he’d often venture out of his safe space to find us. Sometimes he’d come down to that room to see me even when Matthew wasn’t with me.

After about two and a half years of being blessed by Skit’s thereness, of feeling that he would always appear when we needed him and wouldn’t leave, we did the leaving ourselves by going out of town for a weekend. Notwithstanding Skit’s multiple minor maladies, he’d never shown signs of any major illness, and all our other cats seemed fine too, including the eighteen-year-old, so we didn’t have any concerns about leaving them for a couple days. Still, we arranged for a cat-sitter to look in on them, and before we left, I found all five so I could give them a farewell petting and tell them I loved them.

I do this every time we go out of town, and every time we return, we start by looking for each of the cats, to make sure they’re all okay. We assumed they would be this time, too, but as I came into the bedroom, Skit wasn’t there on his blanket. This wouldn’t have alarmed me automatically except for what was on his blanket: he’d had diarrhea, something that had never happened before. Thinking he might be hiding under the bed, I lifted the covers and peered under the edge, but he wasn’t there. Just then, Matthew came upstairs and said, “I found Skit … in the basement by the litterbox…. He’s dead.” Everything had been fine when the cat-sitter had visited the day before.

The abruptness of Skit’s demise made it in some ways less emotionally grueling that when we’d lost cats in the past. We didn’t have to watch him suffer, realize he probably wouldn’t recover, make the awful appointment, and return home with an empty cat carrier. But I’m still not used to the fact that when we come to the bedroom and glance toward the wall by the heater, he’s no longer there.

“Click, click…click, click…click, click.”

You always knew when Skittles, our sweet gimpy tiger kitty, entered a room. His back claws were long and a few of them could not retract all the way, and so he clicked wherever he walked. In addition to the sound, he walked with a staccato rhythm as well; it seems as a kitten he had an accident where he got hung up trying to jump over a baby gate, and it messed up his haunches to where he had a distinctive duck waddle for his back legs. Two quick clicks – “click, click” and a pause, followed by two more clicks as he waded through his daily life.

Skittles was quite a cat. His back-leg injury left his back half pulled-looking, so that although he was a normal weight (about nine pounds), his back half collapsed down to a narrow bony body that was difficult to pet since you could feel every bone in his spine. He had some hair missing around his lips and sometimes his chin, and his physical features in general were somewhat homely when considered individually. But, when you threw in his amazingly sweet temperament, all of his ugly-duckling features combined together in a magical way, making him adorably cute.

By nature shy, Skittles was, I think, reclusive because of his limited mobility. When we brought Skittles home with his father Linus back in May of 2017, we put them in our bedroom to begin the week-long socialization process with our existing kitties. While Linus went on to boldly roam the entire house, Skittles rarely left the safety of his bedroom. He would leave to use the littler box and to eat, but when he did, he added a low growl to his “click, click,” to alert the other cats that he was on the move.

And move he could, especially given his back legs. On the rare occasions I caught Skittles outside the bedroom, he would sprint back to his safe spot at a surprisingly quick pace. Skittles was also able to spring up on the bed, despite his legs. He spent much of his first year hunkered down on our bed.

Until it got cold. Then, Skittles discovered the wonder of the forced-air vent, and he loved that it spit out warm air. He would bundle his bony body beside the register, and would stay there for hours without moving. I felt bad for him sitting on the floor, so I gave him a blanket to sit on, one that he would turn out to be allergic to, causing him to lose his chin hair for months. I eventually figured it out and got him another blanket.

Meredith and I figured that when winter ended, Skittles would jump back on the bed again, but he never really did. He stayed by his trusty vent all through the summer – maybe he liked the air conditioning, or maybe it was his safe spot. Either way, we kept a blanket down for him all the time.

There was one time when Skittles would leave his favorite spot – bedtime. When I climbed into bed, Skittles would click his way over, jump up on the bed, and proceed to sit on my chest while I scratched his ears. He sometimes would settle down in my chest, often with his front claws on my throat, which would cause me to haul the blanket (and Skittles) down the bed and away from my larynx. He would stay as long I I kept petting him. When I stopped, he would either jump down, or go to the foot of the bed for a few minutes before going to get a drink.

How that cat loved water. We kept a bowl of water outside the bedroom for him so that he could get a drink without having to navigate stairs. When I would put fresh water in the dish, he would leave the heat to come get a drink, usually just as I was putting the bowl back down again. He would drink for a long time, and for some reason it was part if his nightly routine as well, after he jumped off the bed.

One of the most amazing things about Skittles is how much he loved me. Mer and I sleep in the downstairs guest bedroom on weekends because the room is darker than our bedroom, making it easier to sleep in. When I would go to bed, about three-quarters of the time, I would get settled and hear “click, click” coming down the stairs. The kitty who loved his heating register and who rarely left the bedroom somehow knew I was in bed, and he was coming down the stairs to get his bedtime loving. It was adorably sweet of him. He even did it once to my brother, Shannon, when Shannon was visiting one weekend; this from the cat who ran from everyone.

This last Labor Day weekend, Meredith and I went to visit a friend in Michigan, leaving on Saturday and returning on Monday. When we left on Saturday, all was well, and there was no indication that Skittles could be ill – he was lying on his trusty blanket as always, and had come up on the bed Friday night for bedtime love. When we got home Monday afternoon, Skittles was not under the bed or on his blanket, which was unusual, but probably meant he was in the basement using a litter box. The only indication of concern was there was some diarrhea next to his blanket. I went looking for him, and I found him lying dead next to a litter box. My guess is he must have had something sudden happen, like a heart attack, and he lost control of his bowels, but he still tried to get to his litter box. What a sweet kitty. He had passed away just one year after his father, Linus, had died, and only around twelve years old.

It is hard now to not see a blanket on the bedroom floor, or to hear “click, click” on the stairs, and when I go to bed, I really miss my sweet tiger kitty. He was an improbable mess of a cat – homely and cute, terrified and friendly, slow and quick, settled and roaming, and he clicked his claws all the way into my heart.

Today was a happy-sad day. Sad because it was our last day of touring in Czechia, at least on this trip. Happy because I could turn in the rental car and rely on public transportation again. I find driving in Europe to be stressful, so it is always a bit of a relief to be rid of the automobile.

But, before we get to Prague, there was more touring to do! I knew it was going to be hot in Prague today, so I wanted to stop somewhere along the way to break up the drive and to putter about somewhere not fully paved with roads and sidewalks baking in the sun. We happened to see a postcard of Castle Zvikov in our B and B in Cesky Krumlov, and so I looked it up. It looked beautiful and looked to be about halfway to Prague. That was our stop.

I was very much surprised to drive through the narrow streets of the small village near the castle only to pull up to a large parking lot nearly full of cars and with a tour bus. It seems that while Zvikov is not on the tour routes known to most Americans, the Czechs know it very well.

While we did not tour the interior rooms of the castle, the grounds and the fortifications were open in which to wander for free. The castle is built on a small peninsula where the smaller Otava and the larger Vltava rivers come together, with a grand view of the rivers, the cliffs around, and the heavily forested hills on the shores. There is also a landing for two boat services that offer to take you up the river and back, but I could not figure out where to buy tickets or how things worked, so I gave up on any boat tours.

We strolled around all the open parts of the castle, resting wherever there was shade and a good view. There were a number of people about, but it never felt crowded; my guess is many people parked in the lot and then took a boat tour.

From the castle, we made our way to the Prague airport, with only a slight detour around the airport to find a gas station to fill the rental car. While there is a gas station on the leaving-the-airport side of the road, for some odd reason there is not one on the going-to-the-airport side. With the help of the GPS, we made it work, and said goodbye to our car. As an added bonus, we met a man in the rental lobby who had his cat with him, so we got to pet a kitty.

We took the bus to the metro, and then walked to our hotel with only one consultation of a map. We got settled, and then took the metro to the Jewish Quarter, where I promptly got lost and proved how close that area is to the Old Town Square when we suddenly turned a corner and found it. We were not supposed to be there. Another hasty map consultation and some furrowed-brow moments, and we found our destination – Speculum Alchemy, the alchemy museum.

Back around 1600, the Habsburg king moved his court to Prague.  Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe both came to work for the court as Prague became a center of learning. The king also sanctioned a secret alchemy lab, where serious minds worked on potions and medicines and tried to transform base metals into valuable ones. At some point, the cellar labs caught fire, and the entrance was bricked over, and so the labs were lost for almost four hundred years. The river flooded badly in 2002, and part of the street in front of the now-museum collapsed, revealing an old underground passage that led to the old labs, where much of the original equipment had survived, including Latin copies of the recipes for the medicines and potions they made.

The museum is very small, but it is (now) dramatically hidden behind a bookcase, which is a nice touch. The lab consisted of only five rooms, but the story was interesting and the fact they had so many original furnishings was great. Who forgets all these things for almost four hundred years? Neat.

After the museum, we strolled back from the Old Town Square, heading to Wenceslas Square. We stopped for supper at an Italian place run by real Italians, and it was in a secluded inner courtyard, making it peaceful, even just fifty yards from tourist central. After supper, we swung by Wenceslas Square to check out the Gallery of Steel Figures, which looked wonderfully touristy, but it was getting late. I’ll settle for a castle and a lost four-hundred-year-old room, and I’ll see the Gallery next time we are in Prague.

If you can’t stand the touring heat, strategize. Today was the first day that heat (sunny, mid-eighties) made carefree touring more problematic. Happily, Mer and I have worked out some heat-related methods from our various travels.

1. Get some elevation. This was not so dramatic today, as I really wanted to go to the top of the nearby hill that has a church on it and promised good views of the town. We trudged up the hill first thing in the morning, and while the sun was still intense, there was some shade along the way. At the top, we did have commanding views of the town, as well as shade and a solid breeze. Also, it was such a pretty spot, we sat on a bench there for some time. Taking it easy is another good method of keeping cool.

2. Pace yourself. We walked into town after hiking down the hill and topping off our water at our B and B. We walked quite slowly, and paused to take a look into St. Vitus Church, which is the tall church in the middle of town. The inside is relatively plain, but the floor-to-ceiling windows are very impressive. Our walk was a fairly long one, over a mile, ending at…

3. Get underground. Since we did a medieval silver mine in Kutna Hora, I thought it would be fun to contrast it with a modern graphite mine that only closed in 2003. Plus, the inside of the mine is always fifty degrees. We put on mine clothes since graphite can stain easily, pulled on boots because of the water in the mine, put on our circa-1990 lead-acid battery hooked to our lights, and climbed aboard a little mine train that took us 1.2 kilometers into the mountain (.75 miles), where we were 250 feet under a hill. Our group all spoke Czech except for us and two others, but we had little papers telling us what we would be seeing. Also, our guide tried to translate the most important things into English, so it was a good experience.

We got to see how air came into the mines through chimneys to the surface, and how that air was blown around by powerful fans (she turned one on for us, and that thing moved some air). We got to see pneumatic drills that drilled holes for the blasting charges, and the equipment used to clean up the rubble, which was sent for cleaning and refining.  We saw a tunnel that was closed for too much radon gas, which made me wonder about how the radon just stayed in there, and we saw little dwarf statues the miners put around the mine in order to placate the real dwarves they thought might be there (even in the 1990s – miners are superstitious).

4. Find shade. A good place to do this is a garden, and Cesky Krumlov’s castle does have one, way up on the hill. It has a formal French garden, which still has some shade trees, and long hedgerows stretching back to a pond full of lilies, fish, and ducks. Along the way, we ran across a revolving outdoor theater – the entire seating area could rotate 360 degrees to face different areas, presumably used for different scenes. It would be interesting to see how that actually worked. We stayed for several minutes at the pond, watching the aquatic foul swimming about, and then walked back to the French garden, where we sat in the shade for a short while. We were handling the heat well.

5. Don’t take a longcut. Sometimes being whimsical on a hot day does not pan out. I could take the we-came-that-way path, or try the new one I saw. We walked down the new one, which went down and south of the old town, with a wall that separated us from it. By the time we got to the bottom, we were quite a ways south of where I had wanted to go, and I was out of water. We stopped at a bakery to get something to drink, and a snack, and made our way back to the B and B. I figured it took about twice as long as it should have.

6. Rest. We stayed in the B and B for about an hour, to cool off and to let the sun get lower so there would be more shade.

7. Find an amazing place to eat in the shade. Mer’s favorite spot in town was where a small canal joins the Vltava River; it looks as if it used to drive a water wheel, but now is just a lovely spot where the water flows together right in front of two of the town’s towers. And there happens to be a restaurant with a terrace right over the canal, and for some reason, we were the only ones on it for a whole hour. It was a pretty relaxing meal.

8. Cool your feet. After supper, we waded in the Vltava, which was cool, but not cold, and it is in the same lovely spot, except now we could see the main wooden bridge of the town. We lingered there for some time too. Oh, and a hot air balloon went by again, while we were standing there in the river.

And so we took a slow walk home, getting back after 8:00. We sat outside and had ice cream bars, and watched the evening light play with the landscape. It was a hot time in the old town tonight.

It was another long driving day – over three hours, with a minor detour and a major pain-in-the-butt drive through a small city in stop-and-go-traffic, with a very odd lack of gas stations or rest stops for the final hour or so, but the end result was worth it. We got to Cesky Krumlov.

The last three full days in Czechia are “my” days: days when I am in charge of the touring. I poked around on the internet for awhile a few months ago, and Cesky Krumlov looked as if it should be very pretty, which it is. It is a small warren of buildings and streets crammed into a bend in the Vltava River, just a few miles north of the Austrian border. It has the second biggest castle in the country (Prague’s is the biggest) overlooking the town, and has a very tall church, St. Vitus, standing on a high point in the center. It all looks like a postcard.

We left the B and B close to 4:00, and I told Meredith that I did not want anything other than a map – I just wanted to wander at whim and get lost. It’s a very small town, and the church or castle is almost always visible, so you can’t get too turned around. We found a small park with an overlook to the castle, and then drifted around until we found the main square, managed to cross the river on one of just two bridges, and puffed our way up the lane into the castle for magnificent views of the main town. It was a good place to linger.

Plunging back into town, we almost left the southern end of town by accident, so I turned us back to find the church. By that point in the evening, it was closed, but I checked out a small lane that ended in a view of the river and was next to a house with an open window. Out of the window came the strains of a very talented piano player practicing some very difficult classical music. So we lingered again for several minutes.

Back we went into the small maze of roads, and across the first bridge again. We found a restaurant our B and B had recommended, and we sat on the terrace next to the river, eating and watching tourists float by in canoes and rafts.

It turns out that watching people shoot the small rapids next to the small waterfalls is highly entertaining. After we ate and left the main town by going south, we found a place where there is some pretty kicky water. Several of us stood on the concrete chute and looked down to the boaters as they passed. Their reactions to the sudden speed of the water and the small drop were varied, but all pretty funny. We lingered there as well.

Just to drive the cute theme home, as we were walking back to our B and B outside of the old town, a hot air balloon drifted overhead and went before us as we went home. It may have been hard to get to, and may be full of tourists, but Cesky Krumlov is worth lingering in.

You are rich when your stable makes twenty-first century tourists think it might be your actual chateau, but you add some money sauce to the cash stew when your grounds are so large, with so many things to see on those grounds, that those poor confused tourists can walk over ten miles on your estate AND take a bout tour on your river, and still not see everything. Such is the wealth of the Liechtenstein family and the wonder that is the Lednice Chateau.

We began in the greenhouse, which at three hundred feet long was quite big – we think the staff member said it was the second oldest greenhouse in all of Europe, after only the one in Kew Gardens in London, but I think that may be the second oldest cast iron greenhouse or some sub-category. Nevertheless, it was impressive:  big and airy-feeling inside, with pleasant views of the French garden on one side. We circled the perimeter twice, once to see it, and once to see it again as a rain shower passed over outside. Mer loved the striped and speckled-leaf plants; I went for the clover and the ferns.

After the shower passed, Mer wanted to find the location of the birds of prey show that was going to happen at noon. On the way there, we passed an archery booth being set up; it was not quite ready yet, so we told the guy we would be back, and we went on to the birds. We passed two handlers with birds coming the other way, to go entice the crowds. We found the show area, and the birds were all there on their perches. There were over thirty different kinds – eagles and buzzards and kestrels and owls and falcons and more. The show helped the group fund programs to rehabilitate wounded birds to be released back into the wild, or so the English signs told us. Satisfied we could get back, we went to shoot things.

Mer wanted me to go first, so I shot a basic bow four times before switching to what I wanted to shoot – a replica of a medieval crossbow. It was fun, and of the three real shots I took (not counting the misfire that happened as I was adjusting my hands), I hit the target twice and just missed the third time. The young man said he was impressed.

Next, Mer had a go. She was quite good with the bow, hitting the target well with three shots. She then really nailed it with the modern crossbow after being too high with her first shot. We both voted Mer “most improved” with the medieval crossbow, just barely missing with her last shot.

After we took a short stroll in the grounds, Mer went to the bird show to get a spot and I ran back to the car to get our umbrellas – the sky was looking threatening. It ended up lightly raining two or three times during the show, and once later as we walked, so having the umbrellas proved useful. On the whole, though, we had good weather all day.

The birds of prey show was pretty great. It lasted a full hour, and the handlers pulled two little kids down to help with the birds at various points. We saw an eagle glide over the field and over us, we saw some smaller hawk-like birds dive-bomb fake rodents being pulled around on strings, we saw a bird knock a remote-control bird out of the air, and more. Most of the birds we saw were very beautiful, although it was hard to see them gulping down raw meat, or, in one case, a whole foot of some kind of bird. Ugh.

From the bird show, we had a quick snack break, since it was after 1:00. We then followed the path thought the ponds and lakes, out past the fake Roman aqueduct, over a couple of pretty wooden bridges, up to the Turkish minaret. According to Rick Steves, the rumor is that the prince wanted to build a church, but the locals could not make up their minds, so he got frustrated and started to build a mosque instead. He did at least build a very tall minaret, which we climbed. Sort of. I bravely made it up to and out on levels one and two (of three), but two was pushing it, so I went back down while Mer went up to three. She said I had made a good choice for my fear of heights, since level three did not add much to the level-two view.

From the minaret, Mer wanted to take a boat ride along the small river on the edge of the estate, which takes a slow and mellow forty minutes to get out to the artificially “ruined” castle on the estate, which our boat guide said was used as a hunting lodge. He also told us the river used to flood the area, so in the 1980s, the main river was rerouted, which caused the floodplain to dry up, killing off many of the trees. So, instead, artificial ways to flood the area were installed at great expense. Progress.

Mer’s plan was to get off the boat at the castle, then take a horse-drawn carriage ride back, but we missed the last one by fifteen minutes. We walked back, about a mile and a half. By then, I was quite ready for supper, so we went back to the car. That meant we left a large portion of the formal gardens unexplored, and we never found several buildings of which we had seen pictures. Next time, I guess.

We drove to the nearby town of Mikulov, which was a postcard of a town wedged between two hills, with a ruin on one and a church on the other. The main square is cozy, colorful, and inviting. The only issue, which keeps being an issue on this trip, was trying to figure out where we could park; I almost left the town because I was getting so frustrated, but then  Mer finally saw a pay-for-parking machine. I bought about $1.50 worth of parking, that gave me the right to park until 8:00. Great! Until I remembered that in Europe, 8:00 pm is 20:00, so my ticket was for 8:00 am. Tomorrow. It turns out parking was free in the evening.

We had some trouble finding a restaurant that was open and still serving dinner, which was odd, because it was only 6:30. Several places were closed, and one was only serving dessert. We did get a good meal at a bistro on one end of the square.

Mikulov was a wonderful-seeming town, and I would have loved to have hiked the two hills and toured the convent in the old town. We had to settle for dinner. Tomorrow we move on to another part of this wonderful little country. Even with two full weeks, we can’t even see all of a chateau estate, let alone all the beautiful places around. That is why we always tell ourselves, “Next time!”