Day 5: Montpellier, Arles, Aix-en-Provence

Today was permeated by rain. So were our shoes. They squelched through the streets of Montpellier, Megan's pumps by far the worst off. The city was beautiful but its beauty was drenched and we drudged through it, doing our best to absorb it all but feeling rather saturated. I put on novelty sun glasses to take the edge off, and we smiled through the damp, smiled through the cold fingers and drowning toes. Smiled at all the people we met and smiled for photos from a dangerously damp camera.

Montpellier was full of wet cobbles, wet fountains, grandiose wet arches, wet promenades and wet people. Wet southerners disgusted at their wetness, hungover from their victorious football victory, commiserating with our washed out holiday. It's not usually like this, they said. Sorry, said their eyes.

We took the tram out to a Odyssey themed shopping park (Circé parking, Rue d'Achilles) and were picked up by Teddy, a young vet student with a rabbit and a rat in the boot of his Peugeot 306. He left us in Arles, at the train station washed up on the banks of the swollen Rhone. We trickled sadly through the streets, gazing at the amphitheatre and other such Roman remnants. The rain washed out the colours. Van Gogh's paintings seemed rather estranged from the scenes they depicted, confetti-scattered round clusters of giftshops as postcards and magnets and tote bags and t-shirts. The colours too bright, too beautiful. The compositions devoid of English tourists in their drab anoraks.

Back at the station we spent half an hour trying to steal a broken French flag, rather unsubtly as it was far above our reach. Our next carshare driver came late and drove us through the rain determinedly. We talked about films and England and France.

Frankie met us in Aix (still raining, spitting persistently) and we headed to her apartment where we were only too glad to take off our soaking shoes and warm ourselves up. She fed us a banquet of pasta and home-made bread-garlic (words switched here for garlicky emphasis). We were left happy, grateful and ever so garlicky. We wandered to a bar for drinks and wandered back through slick shining dark streets, far from dry.

But the rain, it seemed, had finished.