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Disclaimer: This article is copyright to the authors July 2005. All photos used were taken by and are the property of the authors.

The die was cast; the decision made. Ryanair were having a seat sale for over 30 destinations in Europe and we had a few holidays left to use before April. The question was – of all the places available, _ where?

Which was precisely the question when we scanned the list of possible destinations on the Ryanair website and came up with… Nîmes? Still, you can't be too choosy when a) the flight is only a few pounds; b) for a change leaving from an airport that isn't an hour and a half drive and; c) doesn't require you to get up before you've gone to bed just to catch it.

So Nîmes it was.

A quick search on the internet revealed all. And when I say quick, it really was - there wasn't too much to reveal. The Rough Guide, our trusty travellers' bible, could barely rustle up a mention but luckily virtualtourist.com gave us a bit more information. And the handy trivia information that the word denim (as in jeans) originates from the material originally being from/de Nîmes.

Having relied on the Rough Guide for its excellent accommodation recommendations, we took its advice yet again and booked the Hotel Provence as it looked to be the most reasonable place in our price range. There was also a video scan of a gorgeous square out front of the hotel with what looked like a massive fountain surrounded by huge hedges. We did note at the time that the recommendations weren't exactly ringing with their praise but we were willing to once again take a leap of faith.

Nîmes is a tiny French town tucked just outside of Avignon, served by a little airport midway between the two towns. Sounds nice, doesn't it? The kind of sleepy little French town where one imagines old men whiling away the afternoon with a coffee or an absinthe and a bit of brie and baguette. You wouldn't expect to hear that it pre-dated the Romans and in actual fact held some of the best preserved Roman remains outside of Italy, would you? But then, when you remember that France used to be Gaul, it might just start making sense. And how could we resist a small French village with a complete Roman amphitheatre and an intact temple?

Getting over the disbelief of the Roman thing is our only possible excuse for not clueing into the next shock. I remember wondering when I was surfing around why I kept coming across the word Feria so much - it looked vaguely familiar from my dim and distant childhood. And it didn't sound very French - more Spanish really. Spanish? Surely not.

So we did our usual preparations. Reserved the hotel online at the same moment we clicked the button to reserve the flight. Then pasted all of the info on restaurants and sites plus a small map from the Rough Guide onto a word document and printed it out. Drove to the airport and chortling over the price of our tickets, took off.

Apart from the two hour delay (due to snow in Italy, an intriguing concept since we were flying to France) the flight was uneventful. We did our usual trick of packing food for the flight, as Ryanair compensates for its cheap tickets by its extortionate in-flight snack charges.

The local bus from the airport to town cost €4.30 (euros) and dropped us off one stop too early for our hotel. When questioned, the driver informed us that he didn't continue to the next stop. And why should he? Everyone else had gotten out, so what's the point of driving when you don't need to? Perhaps because the schedule says he was supposed to, but that's just our uptight British/Canadian heritage, I guess. But it wasn't snowing, there was a bit of sunshine showing and our hotel was only a few blocks away. So we took it as a chance to explore, albeit with luggage, and continued on foot.

It took a moment for me to recognise the square as we approached it. Apparently the video had been taken about three inches off of the ground and the hedges were actually about one foot high. The fountain as you can imagine, was on a similar scale.

There was no one in the hotel when we got there, no one at all anywhere, and it smelled of sewage. We waited, we rang doors and buzzers, and explored the empty kitchens and halls. Paranoid by this stage that our booking had been messed up, we even peeked behind the desk to check for our name on the register. With much relief, we saw we were booked into - shades of George Orwell - Room 101. But there was this key for the room hanging on a little rack right next to us. So after looking around for a few more moments, I grabbed the key for Room 101 and with a shudder courtesy of 1984, cautiously, slowly, opened the door. And MY worst fear was… hey! There's someone else's stuff already there! AND they had the same bags as we do! Okay, I was momentarily frightened that like some Twilight Zone episode I was showing up after we already arrived in a parallel universe. Or were these belonging to our evil twins? But no, a closer examination revealed it was someone else's stuff, just VERY similar to ours. So the evil twin thing was still in play. As for my Room 101 fears, I was glad there were no rats. Or naked George Bushes.

I slunk back to the foyer and quietly replaced the keys on their peg.

After a further 40 minutes wait, we were rewarded by an appearance of a confused man who sat at the desk and we all pretended he was the desk clerk. Unfortunately, he seemed more interested in how we booked and with whom rather than the fact that we were, in fact, booked. Wanting to drop our bags in our room. Wanting to see the city before it got dark. His English and my French did not solve the problem and after a far too long period we were grudgingly checked in. We dropped our bags off in room 309, then skittered out to grab some views.

But it was dark now. And cold. Our leap of faith was looking like a fall into a pit. Lariel had decided that she hated Nîmes. Its narrow and bisected streets reminded her of Venice, but not in a good way. Every discovery seemed to irritate her even more.

The good news; the Roman amphitheatre we had come to see was fabulous, intact, and still being used. Bad news; it was being used for pretty well the modern equivalent of what it was employed for during Roman times. Slaughtering animals, or what is sometimes called the ‘sport' of bullfighting.

What luck, we had managed to arrive for the Feria Primavera, and six bulls were on the card each of the days of our visit. Soon to appear at one of the local restaurants shortly thereafter. The Bullfighters themselves are like rock stars and have their own groupies following them from arena to arena, but none more prestigious than this ancient coliseum. The town, and the rooms of our hotel, were filled with bullfighting groupies - not the sort of people Lariel wanted to get to know. Or hear, drinking through the paper thin walls of the hotel at 01:00am. It also meant to enter it would cost us a ticket to see the bullfights, something neither of us was willing to do. We circled the amazingly well preserved building several times, hearing the roars and screams of the crowd through the gigantic ancient archways, punctuated by the pronouncements of trumpets. And although it went against Lariel's principles, it was hard not to thrill to the idea that we were closer to Roman times than ever before. Though seeing the carcases of the bulls being removed in a truck in the dark stole that pleasure from us. So back to the hotel to read and prepare for the next day.

Nîmes had been in many many wars, it seemed. It was a centre of the Resistance during World War II and its boulevards reflect its centuries of conflict. Boul de la Liberation, Square 11th Novembre, Ave de la Republique and then there are those named after sundry generals. This added that extra jolt to the note on the back of our hotel door. Its fractured translation meant more than it might in a city that regards warfare as a continuing pattern of life:

"Romms must be Freed at 11hr of morning. Everybody romms not freed in 11hr will be charged on"

Now you try sleeping in late with that on your door when your address is Place de la Revolution. Though I admit I found it reassuring to know that "breakfast are served in the Room of breakfast." But next morning with sunlight streaming in through our window, the city was given a much-deserved second chance as we began to explore with a more open mind.

The old city (that which was within the old Roman walls) is an inverted but slightly bulging triangle shape, which can be crossed in under 30 minutes. The Amphitheatre, les Arenes, is at the base where we were staying. Streets feed into it for the running of the bulls and there are covered stone walkways and a great variety of shops.

On the left extreme of the old city walls is a completely intact Roman Temple, only the second completely intact and non-rebuilt ancient Roman building I have seen aside from the Pantheon in Rome. It is called the Maison Carrée, though it was supposedly a temple to the ‘cult of the Emperor Augustus'. I cannot emphasise enough, how it can change your concept of Roman architecture to climb a series of deliberately shortened steps up towards the looming imperial menace of 20-foot columns. It is meant to create awe, and all the pictures and textbooks in the world will not illustrate it as well as the blunt reality.

Further to the west but outside the ancient city walls are a collection of gardens that rival anything at Versailles. The Jardins des Fontaines are hillside terraced up to a lookout, while spread below are a series of waterfowl filled canals and bridges encircling a lagoon. And where most city parks might have a folly built from cast-off stones, they have an actual ancient Roman temple to Diana! At the top of the hill terraces, reached by a series of winding paths through the gardens, is a Roman lookout tower. We could have walked up its hundreds of stairs inside the tower for a fabulous view over the town if we hadn't been so utterly exhausted. Besides, the little French man sitting near the top, chatting and pointing out places of interest to his baguette whilst lovingly fondling his bottle of vin rouge, put Lariel off.

As well, there were no washrooms at the lookout, which made me wonder where the guy in the booth at the base of the stair went, and with that in mind we headed back downhill.

There was a municipal washroom for Lariel, but first she had to throw a .20 into a plate to get past the chess playing old men who we all pretended worked for the town, hopefully to clean the washrooms occasionally.

Unfair, because the washrooms were clean, and by now we were beginning to really enjoy this town. There were ancient streets filled with shops that were not entirely dominated by touristy crap. There were winding passages leading to medieval courtyards or a cobbled square, Gothic and Spanish style churches scattered about between reasonable restaurants with varying menus. One night a typical Spanish paella, the next a crepe washed down with the excellent local cider.

We made one excursion outside the city walls to find the University of Nimes. Set at another lookout, it was obviously the original fortress for the city, re-enforced over the centuries. We had to pass over two separate moat areas over 30 feet deep, past guard towers set in 20 foot high walls before reaching the outer walls of the university. Once inside, it was like any university in the world as judged by the students, clothing and notice boards. This was a university that would be able to hold out for a while during a student demonstration.

On our last day we arrived at the airport in lots of time, with pockets still full of Euros. So we ran across the highway to a nearby Lidl and stuffed our packsacks with cheeses, wine and cider, all for about a tenth of what they might have cost at home. Satisfied that we'd managed to turn the entire trip into a booze cruise, we had no regrets at all. We even allowed that we might return, or at least pass through on a future car trip through the Cote D'Azure. But that will be another story.