Joe Brealey — Orange

Arrived in Beaucaire on Friday and the immature behaviour continued. Fourteen days into the trip and we are still having sword fights with empty coke bottles, playing ball-tag and relentlessly screwing with each other in any way possible. From what I can see now, I don’t see it ending until the flight home either.

We picked up the Bat-mo van and set off for our new hotel (which was actually enjoyable to spend 5 hours a night in). It was suited out with a pool, a broken tennis table, some double beds and a rare find of a decently powered shower. Very pleased with the rooms we all pretty much scrambled back to our groups, completely disregarding any sort of room allocation until we went to bed. This was our first chance on the trip to get some time to relax at the hotel and we even got some time in the morning to sleep!

After a few days of exploring the surrounding area of Beaucaire we were able to CRACK in a visit to the Pont du Gard (good job Jadams) and many other heritage sites. On our last full day we went out to Orange. Remembering that I had to do my speech on the town, I realised that my speech was terrible compared to the information that we were given by the audio guides. By this point I was kind of hoping that Mr. Bucko would forget and I would be able to slide past (like Jamie and his four missed speeches). It got worse... By the time I got up to do my speech the group was at the very top of the theatre of Augustus and I was chanted on to go to the very bottom to do my speech ‘to test the acoustics’… It ended up being pretty cool in the end. I didn’t mind the extra large audience of the added French because they couldn’t understand me anyway, and my voice sounded awesomely loud because of the design of the theatre.