Everybody's holiday is someone else's hometown

I watched the vineyards through the windows of the bus, and, out beyond them, the whiteness of the limestone cliffs. It was the same whiteness as the walls of the Palais des Papes and the golden icon on the spire, which had, around noon, flashed sharply and blankly in response to the sun.

I watched the vineyards and the ruddy brown earth of them, and it was the same as the earth I’d seen packed in the flower beds in the park behind the Palais. The thick, verdant trees surrounding and dotted throughout it. The red stone spring and the mineral water inside it a high-contrast Polaroid of the sky.

I watched the vineyards for the length of that bus journey from Avignon back to sleepy, sunny Bagnols, caught in a half-scholarly, half-experiential daze at finally having seen the late-Medieval marvel I’d heard of in history class.

That evening, in one of the town’s handful of bars – the sportier one, which nevertheless featured an accordion-heavy jazz troupe – we talked about the area at length, over a cocktail pitcher and a sharer platter of food.

When the conversation had drifted off and back onto topic several times over, and the contents of the pitcher had been drained, replaced, and then drained again, one of the group who’d been pretty quiet until that point spoke up. He said Avignon was alright, but it wasn’t really his thing. He’d been going there – on day trips with his parents; on nights out with his friends – since he could remember, and was tired of it. Sick of it, even. He said that he’d rather go to London. One of his friends had been working there as a waiter for about a year, and he’d gone over to visit last summer and enjoyed it.

‘What about the rain?’ I asked. ‘What about the British food? What’s wrong with you, man?’

He shrugged and said it didn’t bother him, and we joked around with him about how he’d lose his suntan within a month and again he just laughed and shrugged it off.

I was incredulous, and though a bit tipsy, was confident that even entirely sober what he’d said wouldn’t make much sense. The notion of anyone being tired of a city like that, coming off the day I’d had, I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

It was only later, when I was back in my hometown, where I lived in the same house in which I’d spent most of my life, and where there were no vineyards, no cliffs and no castle walls, and where the local park did not feature a mineral spring, that I understood the obvious.

When it comes to travel, different is best.