2 Aussie Nomads

I slept the sleep of the dead last night.

By the time we got to bed last night, I was exhausted. I’m finding the driving here is very tiring. There is quite a bit of cognitive overload driving a left-hand drive vehicle on the wrong side of the road and trying to ensure that you don’t make any silly mistakes.

Like looking right instead of left, and causing an accident.

And with the added stress of the Italian drivers driving so fast on the motorway, you feel as though all of your brain power has been used up by the end of the day.

MBW and I had a conversation the other day about whether we’d get a car again next time. Despite the challenges of the left-hand drive vehicle, the answer is absolutely yes. We will get a car again in a heartbeat.

The flexibility of being able to stop at little townships and make short detours is invaluable.

And finding all of those little boulangeries.

We woke to a rather gloomy day in La Spezia. It was overcast and cool, about 11 degrees.

I felt like I was at a bit of a loss this morning not making my daily trip down to the boulangerie.

But we had breakfast stuff available to us, so we had muesli and milk and coffee for breakfast. Perhaps not a traditional Italian breakfast, but good enough.

We’re not going to starve.

I made a tactical error again this morning. For the last week or so, I’ve been lugging jackets and jumpers and things around with me and never worn them, so today I decided to leave my jacket at home and just go with my hoodie.

We had decided that we were going to see the Cinque Terre today – a string of five very colorful, very scenic, and very pretty little townships built along the north-western Italian coastline.

There are various ways of seeing the Cinque Terre. I asked ChatGPT for its advice on the best way to see it. The recommendation was to take the ferry all the way from La Spezia to the end (Monterosso), and then take the train back again, stopping at every township.

While I acknowledge that MBW knows lots of stuff, ChatGPT knows lots of stuff too. ChatGPT told me that we would have gone through 150 tunnels yesterday from Nice to La Spezia.

MBW didn’t know that.

So, with the big decision having been made – ferry out, train back – the only thing remaining to be decided was how to get to the ferry.

MBW had done some research, but the results were inconclusive.

So we set out to find a bus that seemed like our most likely option. It was only a few minutes’ walk from our apartment, and as we turned the corner, there was the bus pulling in.

So we jumped on board with the expectation that we could tap our credit cards and pay for our journey.

Wrong.

You have to download an app and then pay for a ticket on the app.

MBW – the clever little chicken that she is – had already downloaded the app, so she just had to pay for a ticket. But I hadn’t downloaded the app yet, so by the time I downloaded the app, put in all of my registration information, then corrected things that weren’t correct like matching passwords, it was time to get off the bus.

So I never actually got around to buying a ticket.

My experience as a serial fare evader continues to grow.

It’s not exactly something that I’d put on my LinkedIn profile, but all the same, everyone has to be good at something.

In my defence, it’s pretty hard to type anything, let alone matching passwords, when the driver is driving so erratically that you’d have a smoother ride on a roller coaster.

We walked the remaining short distance down to the ferry terminal, and we were about 30 minutes early, so we just stood and waited.

That was the point at which I started to regret my decision not to wear my puffer jacket today. It was absolutely freezing.

It’s funny how when you’re in a foreign country, you tend to ignore all of the conversations around you because you don’t understand them. But then all of a sudden you hear something that you recognise. Aussies.

Standing behind us.

So we had a lovely chat with the couple, a bit older than us, from Sydney, who were also waiting to get on the ferry.

There was a French tour group that also got on the ferry with us, so the ferry was very packed.

But still, it was a lovely trip, and despite the fact that I was freezing, we got to see all of the towns that make up the Cinque Terre from the water.

The other Australian couple were going to catch the ferry back and stop in at some of the townships on the way. But we were coming back by train.

The five townships that make up the Cinque Terre are Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola, and Riomaggiore. All very pretty, but yet all very similar.

By the time that we got into Monterosso, the clouds had rolled away and we were blessed with stunning blue skies.

Getting off the ferry was quite perilous. The seas were quite rough, and the walkway was on wheels to allow it to move with the boat’s movement, so it would rise and fall quite dramatically.

OK for a spritely young couple like us, but tricky for older people.

I think I mentioned earlier that these townships are built on the cliffs on the coast of north-western Italy. Because they’re on cliffs, there are a lot of steps and a lot of climbing to do.

And climbing makes you hot. I was having another costume crisis – this time wishing I was in shorts because I was so hot. I’m glad I didn’t bring that puffer jacket, only to carry it around all day 😀

It was a great day. Tiring, but great. This is one of those things that MBW has had on her bucket list for a very long time, so she can finally tick it off.

Because all of the townships of the Cinque Terre are on the ocean, seafood is their main commodity.

So we purchased a bowl of fried calamari and chips for lunch. Followed by gelato, of course.

By the time we had caught the train, hopped off at each township, and caught the train going to the next one, it was about 4:15 and we were getting tired. Honestly, while the townships are all very pretty, they all start to look the same after a while.

But my vote is for Monterosso, Vernazza and Corniglia as our favourites. They were so pretty.

We made the decision to head on home.

We got off the train at La Spezia and we asked Google Maps to take us to the nearest bus stop that would bring us back home again.

Crossing a road here in Italy is a bit of a dangerous sport. Not only do the drivers here drive erratically, but when you try to cross the road even on a zebra crossing, they swerve to actively avoid having to stop for you.

It’s a bit like Vietnam in a way. You try not to make eye contact with them and just walk out confidently. Even so, it’s still pretty perilous.

There were lots and lots of American tour groups at the Cinque Terre townships today. Their tour guide must carry some sort of a transmitting device and all of the tourists in the group have a receiving device with an earpiece, so that they can listen in.

They look like a bunch of very elderly secret service agents, all listening in on their earpieces.

We got back to our apartment at about 5:15 and dropped into the Co-op to get some things to supplement leftover pizza for dinner.

Tonight, we’re having gnocchi with some ricotta and walnut pesto sauce.

It seems like the right thing to do while we’re here in Italy.

For tomorrow, we have a half baked idea that we might try to get over to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower. Word on the street is that parking is absolutely impossible in Pisa so we’re trying to avoid driving at all costs.

But not driving means taking the bus, and that could be a lengthy exercise. And probably stressful. And dangerous.

And I’m not sure if dying in a bus accident is covered in our travel insurance.

I’ll ask MBW what she thinks, but then I’ll ask ChatGPT for another opinion anyway.

My watch tells me I’ve done over 16,000 steps today and climbed 34 flights of stairs, so I’m feeling a little bit weary.

MBW’s keen to watch a movie about Tuscany on TV tonight. Hopefully, we can find something in English. Hopefully, I can stay awake.

Our Italian is improving. We now know how to say “I can’t speak Italian”.

That’s progress, at least.

Ciao

#Europe2025

We woke to another spectacular day on the Cote d’Azur. Stunning blue skies and hardly a cloud in the sky.

Beautiful cool crisp air, temperature around 12°.

Our last day in Nice and our last day in France. Today, we head off to Italy.

We will be back in France again later in the trip. We have to come back through France on our way back to Paris to drop off Claude and head home.

I took the well beaten path down to the boulangerie to get breakfast.

MBW gave me strict instructions. She wanted an almond croissant.

I found out that the nice young girl in the boulangerie didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak French.

But somehow I managed to communicate that I wanted a couple of almond croissants.

“Croissant almond” and try to sound French. Oui, oui, s’il vous plaît?

She had a brief conversation in French with the boss, and then she turned back to me and shook her head. No.

No almond croissants.

Unfortunately, it was a bit difficult to get the message across that my wife had said, “Don’t come home without almond croissants.”

So I purchased 4 plain croissants foe breakfast and a baguette for lunch, and hoped for the best.

€5.

Cheap cheap.

We had breakfast looking out over the ocean. And coffee.

We’d already done most of our packing up, so once breakfast was over, I took the first load of stuff down to the car.

We messaged Farzad to let him know that we would be ready to go by nine o’clock.

Claude hasn’t been anywhere for three whole days. It’s a much better idea to be a bus ninja than try and navigate the streets of Nice.

And to try to find somewhere to park.

I’ve mentioned previously that the trip from Nice to La Spezia is about 3.5 to 4.5 hours using toll roads, and about 7 or 8 hours not using toll roads.

Taking the toll roads today was a no-brainer.

We got Claude loaded up, and then we headed out of the car park and downstairs to meet Farzad to hand over the keys and say goodbye.

Josephine got her instructions to get us out of Nice and on the road to La Spezia.

Now I have to confess to feeling a little bit anxious about driving again today. I feel a bit like I’m out of practice. But I’m hoping that Claude doesn’t feel the same way.

I’m not sure how many road rules I’ve broken today, but I’m sure there were quite a few. Many of the roads in Nice are quite narrow. Joséphine gives you an instruction to take the second lane from the left to enter the motorway, but there really wasn’t a second lane from the left.

So I put my blinker on and moved on over, just like any Frenchman would.

We’d made our first wrong turn within 10 minutes after leaving home, which resulted in a bit of a go-around, but once you get on the motorway – seriously – there’s not much you can do wrong.

It’s not like you can just do a U-turn without going another 20 or 30 kilometres first as a penalty.

Once we were only about 30 minutes out of Nice, we crossed across into Italy.

Unfortunately, my photographer wasn’t paying attention and she missed the photograph opportunity. So you’ll just have to trust me.

But I’ll be having a word with her at her next performance review.

Italy is the land of tunnels. It’s so hilly and mountainous here that they build tunnels through the mountains. So we’re driving along a spectacular ocean road overlooking the water, and then the next minute, we’re into a tunnel.

Which probably makes the time difference between “tolls” and “no tolls” more understandable. I know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and a straight line takes you through mountains. Big ones.

So you need tunnels, and tunnels cost money. And these ones must have cost a fortune.

Digging out all of that rock can’t be cheap.

The alternative is to go around – or over – the mountains, and that’s just crazy talk.

My first observation of Italy is that the speed signs are confusing. I don’t know whether they are just recommendations, whether they are not enforced, whether they don’t matter on Sundays, or whether the locals just completely ignore them.

Driving on the road from Nice to La Spezia was completely different to driving on the toll roads in France.

In France, the toll roads are 130 km per hour – very wide, very fast, and big wide sweeping corners. You can literally sit back and relax while you’re driving along a toll road in France.

But in Italy, the speed limits keep changing. I acknowledge that they had a lot of roadwork happening on the motorway today, but the speed limits would change from 110 down to 100, down to 90, down to 60, down to 40, and then back to 110 again. Or 50.

Or they just say that the previous speed restriction was lifted and you could pick a number you liked.

But what was most confusing was that at one point I was in a 40 zone doing 75 and trying to keep up with the cars in front. Then some high powered German car went roaring past me like I was standing still.

Seriously, some of them travel so fast on the motorway that you’re looking at your rear view mirror about to change lanes, and by the time you’re in the overtaking lane, they’re right up behind you, and scaring the cr*p out of you.

At around about 10:30 this morning we decided that we wanted to stop for smoko. They don’t have boulangeries here in Italy, and I’m not quite sure what they have instead.

So MBW found something that looked reasonable in a little township called Spotorno. Parking was a nightmare, so I dropped her off and I went to do a lap of the block.

Unfortunately – and we learned a valuable lesson abour using her phone to find a bakery in Spotorno – when she hopped out of Claude and took her phone with her, I had no idea where I had to come back to. That address wasn’t in my Google Maps.

So I just kept driving around until I found something that looked familiar, and then made my way back again.

Driving in Italy is very different, mainly because of the different language. Obviously, we have learned enough French to feel comfortable with the road signage in France, but in Italy, it’s all very different again.

And a bit stressful. A whole new language we have to learn.

And learning a new language at our age is tough work.

But we found somewhere to stop and make a cuppa and had our morning tea.

I said before that the Italian motorways (that we have experienced so far) have lots of tunnels. I reckon we probably went through 80 to 100 tunnels today between Nice and La Spezia.

You can come out of one and straight into the next one.

MBW – the clever chicken that she is – realised that the signage before the tunnel told you how long it was. The longest tunnel that we went through today after we realised that information was available, was almost 1.8 kilometres

The other thing I’ve noticed about Italian motorways is that they’re not as straight or as easy to navigate as the ones in France.

There’s quite a lot of corners and curves that you have to navigate. I’m sure that if you were driving an Italian sports car that handled like it was on rails, it would be a fun drive.

But Claude struggled a bit. Especially with all our luggage on board.

We saw lots of police on the road today. At one toll both there must have been half a dozen or more police cars lined up watching the traffic. We also saw a few people pulled over at various times.

We figure that with our red French number plate we could be a target, but we will see how that goes.

But it all ended well. We arrived in La Spezia just before two o’clock and contacted Monica, our host for tonight.

Monica is lovely and speaks excellent English. The apartment is just beautiful. She showed us around and showed us how everything worked.

She gave us some recommendations for dinner, and told us about some things that we really needed to do while we are here.

After we had unpacked the car and had some lunch, we headed out for a drive down to Portovenere. This was one of the places that we were told we really needed to visit.

Unfortunately, it is Sunday afternoon and a beautiful day here in La Spezia Italy, and the people were out in droves.

On the drive we saw some beautiful views of the Italian coastline, but we were just unable to park anyway for more than a few minutes. But we will take a bus ride down there again tomorrow.

There is a Co-op (or maybe it’s a Coop?) across the road, so we dropped in and got some groceries.

One of the places that Monica recommended for dinner was a pizza place around the corner. We’ve been driving all day, and we were pretty tired, so we just went and got pizza.

And it was pretty darn good.

Tomorrow we will do the Cinque Terre (five colourful villages on the coastline). That should be a great day.

That will be another ticketing card or app to add to my collection.

I’ll tell you about the crazy Italian drivers tomorrow.

Ciao

#Europe2025

I think that I have become just a little bit too comfortable with this whole “rinse and repeat” life in the French Riviera.

We got up early again this morning and saw the sunrise. That’s 3 days in a row. Lucky the sun doesn’t rise until after 7:00 a.m.

I’m certain it won’t be happening once we get back home.

We had a bit of a conversation about breakfast. I mean, we have breakfast cereal and milk available, but MBW made a good point that we’re only here for two more days and we don’t know what they eat in Italy for breakfast.

So we had to do what we had to do. Somebody has to take one for the team.

I toddled down to the boulangerie while MBW washed her hair.

On the way to get our croissants, there was a really bad smell as I walked along the footpath.

A lot of people here in Nice have dogs, and they spend a lot of time out walking their dogs. Many of them are tiny rat-like creatures (sorry dog lovers who own a small rat-like dog), but some of them are big, hulking animals that make a big hulking mess.

I didn’t know whether something had died or whether I’d stepped in something.

There are rules here if your dog makes a mess on the footpath; you’re expected to pick up the mess, but not everybody does. I don’t think it’s very well pooliced.

Did you see what I did there? Pooliced?

But halfway to the boulangerie, I was overwhelmed with an overpowering smell of bread and croissants cooking.

Ahhh. My happy place.

Anyhow, today we were planning a trip to Monte-Carlo in Monaco, the gambling capital of the French Riveria.

So when I went to get the croissants, I was feeling a bit reckless and decided to go double or nothing. I bought four.

And once again, they were still warm.

We had our breakfast, gave the apartment a tidy, and set off on today’s adventure.

You may recall that we bought two-day passes for the buses and trams. They weren’t specifically two day passes, they were good for 48 hours from first activation, so that meant that we still had a couple of hours on our passes before they expired, just before 10 o’clock this morning.

So we set off early to have another look at the markets.

We poked around the markets for a little while and bought some nougat from a vendor.

Once we had seen everything we wanted to see at the markets, we headed off on foot to find the train station to take us to Monaco.

Monte-Carlo is not in France BTW. It’s in Monaco, which is a different country.

I made another serious tactical error today. The forecast for Nice was 20 degrees, but the forecast for Monaco was only 16. And 16 is cool enough to wear a long sleeve t-shirt and carry a jacket just in case.

But by the time we had been wandering around the markets for about 10 minutes, I was really hot and sweaty and wishing that I’d worn a short sleeved t-shirt.

We headed off to the Gare de Nice-Ville Station, which was a bit of a journey. Google Maps took us on 3 sides of a square, so we obviously went the long way.

When we got to the station, there were people gathered around everywhere, all queued up to buy tickets from machines. The app wouldn’t work for us, and their “scan me” QR codes didn’t work either.

We ended up going to the ticket office and asking the attendant for the best way to get to Monaco.

We bought two return tickets for €24.

Trains to Monaco leave every 15 minutes, so we hopped on board the very next one that was leaving.

You get an absolutely stunning view over the French Riviera coastline as you travel by train up from Nice to Monaco.

It was only a short trip on the train, about 20 minutes.

Once we were off the train in Monaco, we went in search of the tourist office. We found a very helpful lady who told us all of the key things that we should see when we only have one day there.

So the first thing that she suggested that we do was to hop on a bus and head up to the palace. The changing of the guards occurs at 11:55 every morning.

We also learned that the Monaco F1 Grand Prix is happening very soon, so they were setting up for that. Plus there is tennis on at the moment, so Monte-Carlo was super busy with the rich and famous, and the wannabes.

By this time it was getting seriously hot in the sun, and we were both regretting wearing long sleeve t-shirts. In fact, I would have been far more comfortable wearing shorts.

But we watched the changing of the guards – all pomp and ceremony – and then we went and bought tickets to see inside the Prince’s palace.

The palace is only open to visitors for 6 months of the year, but the prince must be away at the moment, and so from about the fourth of April, it’s open to the public.

Given that our personal invitations to visit the prince hadn’t arrived before we got there, we had to pay €10 each to get in and have a look around.

But it was worthwhile visiting, and we were glad that we did. Your €10 includes an audio guide that tells you about various things as you wander around the palace.

By this time it was pushing two o’clock and we were getting hungry so we found a place to buy a sandwich for lunch and then we went back by bus down to the city.

We had come this far and we were keen to visit the Casino de Monte-Carlo.

We had been warned that we weren’t appropriately dressed to enter the casino, but we thought we would just see what happened.

There is some serious wealth around Monaco. Obscenely serious weatlh.

You may recall the other day I said I’d seen two Bentleys in one day. Well today I saw three or four Bentleys, Rolls Royce’s, more Lamborghinis than I could count on one hand, Ferraris, and Porsches.

You name it. Oh plus a couple of Aston Martins.

I’m glad we didn’t bring Claude … I’d have been so embarrassed. Poor Claude.

I felt like saying to MBW that “I wonder what the poor people are doing,” but I already knew what I was doing.

There were lots of people going into the casino, so we thought we’d go and give it a try.

You get a pat down on your way in the front door by security, and they want to look at all of your bags. They probably just want to see what the poor people carry in their backpacks.

So we got into the casino and had a look around the foyer, and learned that once you show your passport to security again, you can go into the first room for free.

The first room is where all the poker machines are. Well, the cheap ones anyway.

MBW figured that as we had come this far, we should have a crack on a poker machine. Maybe we could pay for some of this holiday. Or at least lunch …

So she borrowed €5 from me and fed it into the machine.

She then proceeded to play a very high risk and high stakes game on the one cent machine. She played five lines at a time, five cents per bet.

OK, so I acknowledge that she had three wins of 25 cents each, but she then proceeded to lose the whole €5.75.

I mean, that was tomorrow’s croissant money.

If you want to go beyond the first room into the casino they charge you €20 to get in but I’ll bet that the guy who parked his Lamborghini out the front didn’t have to pay €20 to get in.

It was hardly a surprise that we lost our €5, so we headed back out of the casino again and down towards the beach to have a look.

There were lots of rich people lying on the beach, sunning themselves. The water was a beautiful crystal clear blue, and I would have loved to have taken my shoes off and had a paddle to see what it was like.

But they didn’t need a poor person like me invading their beach.

It was getting late and we needed to head back towards home.

So we did the bus ninja thing again, and caught the bus back to the train station, to then hopped on the train back to Nice.

On the bus heading back to the Monaco train station, there were 3 teenage girls who were, like, talking about, like, their lives and, like, stuff. Unfortunately, they kept switching between French and English.

One would ask a question in French, and the other would answer in English. It was pretty difficult to follow the conversation when I could only understand half of it.

And I didn’t feel this was a situation where I could comfortably say “Je ne parlez pas francais.”

We got back home to the apartment just after 5.00pm and sat down and had a cuppa and some nougat.

One of the problems with travelling for more than four weeks is that I become desperately in need of a haircut. That’s now going to have to wait until sometime when we’re in Italy. That’s another Italian phrase that I’m going to have to learn.

MBW told me today that it’s three weeks tomorrow before we fly home, and that just makes me sad.

But 3 weeks is 3 weeks, and tomorrow we head off into Italy.

After having croissants for breakfast again.

Claude has had the last few days off, so he should be well rested.

It’s a fairly long trip tomorrow – about 3.5 to 4 hours using toll roads and about eight or nine hours without using toll roads.

So we’ll be taking the toll road option.

We don’t actually have to be out of Farzad’s apartment until six o’clock tomorrow night, which is quite unusual, but we aim to be gone by about 10 o’clock so that we can get into Italy sooner rather than later.

Hopefully everyone will be in church – or still in bed – so we won’t have to battle traffic out of Nice.

It’s been another fabulous day on the French Riviera. The weather here has been fantastic; warm, sunny, beautiful.

I can see why this is the place where people come to retire.

We have some really exciting stuff planned for when we’re in Italy, and you’ll read about that in the next couple of weeks.

Ciao

#Europe2025

Another fabulous day here on the French Riveria.

The weather gods were smiling on us, Apollo was smiling on us … or maybe he was smiling at us. Or maybe … ?

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – breakfast is the most important meal of the day. So we were up, showered, and I set off to our local boulangerie for croissants for breakfast. We had a big day ahead of us and we need sustenance.

I popped on down while MBW was finishing her ablutions. It is only a 5 minute walk down the street. We’ve only been into our “local” once previously, and that was in the evening of last night. We bought something that looked like dessert (that I’m not even going to try and spell) and had it with our coffee.

It was so good that we voted on going back today for croissants.

I bought 3 croissants. Two of the regular ones, and a chocolate one. They cost me the grand sum of €3.20, which is so cheap. When he handed them to me in a paper bag, I nearly cried.

They were still warm.

I’m never going to be able to eat a couple of slices of Woolworths multigrain bread with butter and marmalade for breakfast again in my life.

So I scurried home with them and we set them out on our little verandah on the 7th floor overlooking the Mediterranean Coast, and ate them with butter and strawberry jam. And coffee.

I’m pretty sure that this is what Heaven is going to be like. And I’m pretty sure that it will smell like that boulangerie at 8.00 o’clock in the morning too.

Now I have to confess an impure thought this morning. I briefly considered – while holding three warm croissants – eating the chocolate one and only admitting to buying two croissants.

But MBW would know. She’d see it in my eyes 🙁

They were soft and flaky and warm. And so, so good.

Breakfast over, we gave the apartment a quick tidy and headed out to our walking tour with Antoine. It was scheduled for 10.00am on the Promenade des Anglais, which is about a 10 minute bus ride towards the centre of Nice.

We got there a bit early, so we went for a walk on the beach, and then we sat in the blue chairs looking at the waves roll in over the rocks.

Here’s a fun fact: the surf coming in and out over the rocks makes a completely different sound to what it makes at home when it washes over sand.

And here’s another fun fact: I realised that it has been 50 years since I was last in France, in 1975. My parents brought us to Britian and Europe on holidays, and I remember sitting on the beach at Nice.

I’ve noticed that the beach at Nice hasn’t improved any in the last 50 years either. It is still rocky.

While we were sitting on the blue chairs, we watched a young (20s?) couple strip off down to their swimmers and go in for a dip. While I am sure that the water was cold, what was funnier was watching them try to walk across the “beach” in their bare feet, as it was obviously very difficult and uncomfortable.

Antoine turned up right on time, and off we went.

Now, as usual, I’m not going to try to recall everything that we saw and every fact that we were given. But – also as usual – it was an interesting and informative walking tour, and afterwards we didn’t really feel like there was anything that we wanted to see.

In summary though, we walked along the Promenade des Anglais which was an absolute treat. It had a real “California” feeling about it, with perfect blue skies, a beautiful beach (if you can ignore the rocks), and people rollerblading and jogging along the promenade.

In fact it was such a perfect day that we were down to short sleeves by 10.15am.

We saw all of the beautiful old buildings along the promenade, then we walked into the main square (Place Massena) and saw Apollo in all of his glory, then walked through the flower markets, the regular markets, and then the old town (Vieux Ville).

We saw places where Napoleon Bonaparte lived, and we were shown some great places to eat.

And of course – just like on every walking tour so far – we saw the old church that is in the centre of the old town, and is simply spectacular.

We rounded off the tour by going around and seeing the harbour and then around further to see the beach from the top of a hill.

It was only a small tour, with a couple (about our age) from Perth, and a young couple from Croatia. A small tour is a good tour, because it means that we can ask questions and be a little bit flexible.

But it was also a long tour … a 2 hour tour that went more than 2 and a half hours, and we walked 4-5km total.

So we were pretty tired by the end.

After the tour, we were only around the corner from the markets, so MBW and I popped back in to see what we could see before they closed at 1.00pm, and to get something for lunch.

We had a panini with curried chicken and cheese for lunch, and we then needed to figure out what to do for the rest of the afternoon.

We were supposed to do a second walking tour this afternoon up to Villefranche, but it cancelled because the guide had some health issues. And – TBH – I’m glad it was cancelled because we were pooped.

So we decided to go up to Villefranche by ourselves anyway, by bus.

Villefranche is a sleepy little seaside village, with lots of medieval charm. It even has a very old and unusual street called Rue Obscure, which feels like it is still stuck in time.

There is not a great deal to see or do in Villafranche-sur-Mur except for sitting by the water and drinking champagne … which I know sounds like a dream come true, but we needed to get back to Nice to meet with Hannah – the daughter of a friend of ours. Hannah lives here in Nice, and we were meeting her at 5.30 back in the square (Place Massena).

So we caught the bus and tram back to our apartment, getting back by 4.00pm or so, and we had a cuppa and a rest while we waited.

We had a lovely catchup with Hannah this afternoon, and we sat and chatted for about 90 minutes until it started to get cold.

We played bus ninjas again and made it back to our apartment by around 7.30. We stopped at our local boulangerie just as they were closing and bought a baguette for dinner.

We did already have food in the fridge for dinner tonight, but it was getting late. So we had some cheese and chicken on a baguette like a couple of locals.

And that was our day. A really informative and relaxing day wandering the streets of Nice and Villefranche-sur-Mur, and a nice catch-up with Hannah this afternoon.

There is a lot of money around Nice – more than I had expected.

I reckon that if I had €10.00 for every Porsche that I’ve seen today, I could retire … although technically I have already retired, so maybe I could buy a Porsche instead.

Speaking of money, tomorrow we think we will catch the bus or train from here to Monaco for the day. We will probably start at the local markets again, then jump on the train or bus for the trip to Monaco.

We have been told that it is all very much like Las Vegas, although I’ve not been to Las Vegas so I have no reference point.

But I have been to Twin Towns and had a go on their 5 cent poker machines, so I might have a go on the 5 cent machines in Monaco tomorrow.

Wish me luck!!

Ciao

#Europe2025

After a big day driving yesterday, it was a nice change to leave Claude at home and go exploring today.

We had a couple of walking tours booked in Nice, but one changed the time to tomorrow morning, and the other also changed the time to tomorrow afternoon, then cancelled due to health reasons.

MBW – as usual – has done her research and suggested that Èze was where we were going today. It is up in the mountains, and has a mediveal castle at the top of the hill with some exotic gardens.

And we do like medieval castles.

It is also closer to Monaco than it is to Nice, and is has around 2,500 inhabitants known as Ezasques.

The only thing it doesn’t have is a frequent and reliable bus service … but we will come to that later.

Traffic in Nice is a little … hmmm … crazy. Well, it’s crazy around where we are staying. So we decided to be public transport ninjas today.

But before I tell you about that, I need to tell you about this place we are staying.

We are staying in Farzad’s place, on the 7th floor of an apartment building that overlooks the water.

And when I say “the water”, I’m not talking about a sewage treatment plant. No siree, I’m talking about the Mediterranean Coast.

The Côte d’Azur.

The airport is just to our right, but we don’t hear any noise from the planes, and there is a supermarket on the ground floor, which is very handy-dandy when we have run out of something important, like chocolate.

We also have private parking, which is good for Claude. Set and forget.

The apartment is a bit old, but it is clean and functional.

The tram line is also just below us, and it is just a short walk to our nearest stop.

Most importantly though, there is a boulangerie just down the street, so tomorrow morning we will be sitting on our verandah watching the world go by, eating pastries and drinking coffee.

Does it get any better than this? Seriously?

We got up a bit earlier today, although it was hardly a gold medal winning performance. I think it was around 7.00am, but that’s OK, because that is sunrise here. So we got up and got some pictures of the sun coming up over the water.

I’ve noticed a lot of vapour trails from passing aircraft here. I don’t know why that is, but I assume that it has something to do with the cooler air here. If you have a view on that, feel to let me know.

We got up, took some photos, and had brekky. Lots to do, and only 3 days to do it here in Nice.

So once we had decided on Èze, we just had to figure out how to get there. You will recall that I have been lamenting the fact that every place we have been to has a different public transport ticketing system. Well guess what? Nice has a different one again.

Fortunately Nice uses both a card system and an app, so I don’t have yet another card in my wallet. But I might consider opening a museum of bus tickets when we get home. For a couple of euros, I’ll allow you to come and have a look.

So we downloaded the apps on our phone, and figured that – as we are here for 3 full days – we are better off getting a two day pass than a one day pass, because we save a whole euro each.

Which is about $1.65 each in real money, and it means that we don’t need to buy a new pass every day.

So we installed the app, bought our passes online, and locked the apartment to toddle down to the tram station.

Now you are probably wondering why we bought 2 day passess when we are here for 3 days, right? The only option after a 2 day pass was a 7 day pass, and Farzad will expect us to be gone long before that expires. If we need more, we will buy another day. Or we might take Claude out for a spin instead.

The tram rolled in, we hopped on, tapped our phones, and we were off.

On a side note, and probably mainly for the benefit of my colleagues from QR who may be following along, the trams here are obviously made by the same people who built QR’s NGR fleet, because much of the hardware on the trams was the same … like the button to open the doors.

I’m not really sure why I’ve noticed that, but old habits are hard to break, I guess.

The tram took us east towards the centre of Nice itself, where we disembarked and went in search of a connecting bus – the 82.

It’s always a bit concerning when you turn up at the bus stop to see maybe 40-50 people waiting ahead of you, but Èze is a popular destination and there will be buses every 10 minutes … won’t there?

It is in fact correct to say that Èze is a popular destination, but it is absolutely incorrect to assume that there is a regular bus service.

The 82 bus came whizzing along, and reminisent of Brisbane’s public transport system, the bus was jam packed and the driver didn’t even slow down. He shrugged his shoulders and formed his forearms into a “X” shape, which obviously translates to “there’s no way you are getting on this bus, even if I wanted to let you”.

We checked with Google Maps and found that the next 82 is not for another hour, so we changed our expectations and found another bus that was heading basically in the right direction, but that we could get on.

We got off at a place called Beaulieu-sur-Mer, which was a pretty little seaside village with a beach that had people swimming. To be completely accurate there was only 1 person swimming, and he didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much. He must have lost a bet.

I offered MBW $10 if she took off her shoes and went for a paddle so that she could give me a beach report, but she is not that silly.

So we poked around there for about 20 minutes, and then went back to the bus stop to wait for the next bus (as 83 as it happens), hoping that most of the passengers will have disembarked before getting to Beaulieu-sur-Mer.

We were in luck, so we jumped aboard and went the rest of the way up the the hill to Èze Village.

The road up the hill had more twists and turns that an Agatha Christie novel. The bus drivers must be paid danger money because the bus is skirting the edge of the cliff, and they have to swing completely onto the wrong side of the road to take each corner.

And did I mention that the road is extremely narrow? And there are cars coming the other way?

We got into Èze Village around 11.45am and you’ll never guess what they had in progress.

Markets!

There is not really much to see up in the Èze Village, but what there is, is spectacular. There is a medieval castle with some exotic gardens (Jardin Exotique d’Èze) that you have to pay to see, but well worth the entry fee.

You can walk up and around the gardens, and the views from the top of the gardens is amazing.

We potted around for a couple of hours and we tried some Socca, which is a traditional food made from chickpea flour and olive oil and cooked in a wood-fired oven.

Tasty, salty, interesting.

After spending a couple of hours in the medieval castle and gardens, we decided that we needed lunch, and we needed to figure out how to get back home.

We bought a tomato, goat’s cheese, and honey panini for lunch, followed by ice-creams.

That’s twice I’ve had goat’s cheese and honey recently, and I’ve enjoyed it. It might be our new “thing” when we get home.

But I may need to buy a goat. And a beehive.

Because we are very close to Monaco, there is a lot of money around Èze. I imagine that it would be expensive to buy or build a house on the edge of that hill with those views, but the other givewaway was that I think I saw more Bentleys and Ferraris today than I have ever seen in my life.

Plus all of the Mercedes, BMWs and Audis that the “poor” people drive.

We checked the bus timetable and found that the only bus back was 2.15, with the next one after 6.00pm tonight … so lucky we checked. It was now 1.45, so we took off for the bus stop to find 30 or so people already waiting for the bus … which didn’t inspire confidence in our ability to get home tonight.

But we made a very clever tactical move. We saw the bus that we wanted to catch come up the hill and stop around the corner to unload all of the incoming passengers. We also knew that it has one more stop at the very top of the hill before it turns around and comes back down for the return journey … so we jumped on the bus as it was going up to its last stop, and rode to the top and back down to pick up everyone else.

You’d want to trust that the bus drivers aren’t drunk – or have kamikaze tendencies – because it wouldn’t take much to send one of those buses over the cliff, and all of the passengers into eternity.

We got back down to the centre of Nice and did the first part of today’s trip in reverse, catching the tram back to our station, and then a short walk home.

It feels like we really didn’t do much today because we only visited Èze. But keep in mind that the trip there was a bit onerous – it’s hard work being a public transport ninja – and Èze is built at the top of a hill, so there were lots and lots of stairs to navigate. And they had a pretty poor building code 500 or so years ago when they built medieval castles, so the stairs are neither flat, uniform, or smooth.

But climbing stairs will be good practice for when we climb the 463 steps of Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence in a couple of weeks.

We’ve had another great day here in France. Nice is a pretty place and we are enjoying it.

Tomorrow we have a walking tour and we will need to get some more mileage out of our transport passes, and tomorrow night we are meeting a friend’s (hi, Maree!!) daughter who we have just learned lives in Nice … so we are meeting her for coffee.

I hope that you are enjoying tagging along!!

Ciao

#Europe2025

It was another driving day today. Sort of a rest day, and hopefully not too stressful.

We checked out of Laurent & Didier’s place at Aix-en-Provence, and checked in to Farzad’s place in Nice.

But a lot happened between those two events.

We let Didier know last night that we would be departing at around 9.00am this morning, and he responded (via the AirBNB app) that he would be there to say goodbye. Personally I like the social interaction with our hosts, although we have had very little of it for this trip so far.

We have interacted with Didier on a couple of occassions now … when we arrived Didier welcomed us holding his 10 month old son (Milo – pronunced “Mee-lo”- I think he said), and we saw Laurent playing on the trampoline with (what I assume was) his son, who must have been about 7 or 8.

From what I can gather, Laurent and Didier are married and there are a couple of kids, but I’m not entirely sure who belongs to who. Experience has taught me not to ask a question if you don’t really need to know the answer.

Other than a couple of sightings, we have not had anything to do with Laurent. Maybe he is shy.

So just before 9.00am, I opened the front door and started taking suitcases out to Claude. Laurent was putting his son into the car, so I gave him a cheery “Bonjour”. I turned away for a moment, and by the time I’d turned back to introduce myself, Laurent was in his car and driving away.

Maybe he is very shy. Or he was late for work.

So I made a few trips in and out to get all of our stuff loaded, and started the engine, but there was no sign of Didier.

We made a show of turning Claude around in the driveway to make it clear that we were leaving, but he was still a no-show. So we dropped the keys into the letterbox, sent him a quick goodbye on the AirBNB app, and took off.

It was a cool start to the day – 7 degrees that felt like 5, so we kept our jackets handy in the car.

Aix-en-Provence to Nice is about 2 and a half hours on the toll road, and we had previously told Farzad (tonight’s host) that we wouldn’t be in Nice until about 3.00pm, so the maths didn’t work.

We decided to take the scenic route … the one without tolls. That one is about 4 hours and if we add in a stop for lunch, it might just work out. It might be a long stop for lunch, but it will be a nice, relaxing drive in the country.

Hopefully. What could possibly go wrong?

We gave Joséphine her instructions and headed off. I was particularly anxious to avoid the centre of Aix generally, and the bus lanes specifically, so we made sure that Joséphine understood that expectation.

An expression that springs to my mind when driving in France, is that “He who hesitates is lost”. Or perhaps the more relevant expression is that “he who hesitates, disintegrates”.

I have found that driving in France requires you to behave just like everyone else, which is somewhere between decisive and aggressive .. but it’s a fine line.

If you see a gap in the traffic, you just take it. If you need to change lanes, just do it and someone will get out of the way. They seem to be very efficient at just moving across to another lane if you move into their spot.

In fact I’ll go even further and say that the French not only accept that style of driving … they EXPECT it. They expect you not to hesitate.

The early part of the route took us along some of the same roads that we take when we have been to the park and ride facility, so we recognised some of those streets. But before we had gone 5km, we had already taken our first wrong turn.

Joséphine’s instructions were unclear. She said that we needed to be in the left lane ready to turn left, but I must have misjudged how far it was until the turn, and so I found myself turning onto the A8 motorway.

Not the end of the world – Joséphine will work it out.

But it turned out that Joséphine wasn’t entirely unhappy with this mistake, as she just took us a slightly different way that got us heading in more-or-less the right direction, with roughly the same ETA.

Remember the other day after our Aix-en-Provence walking tour and we just wanted to do a nice drive in the country – on the Route Cézanne towards Le Tholonet – and we simply couldn’t find it? Well as luck would have it, this morning’s wrong turn took us directly into Le Tholonet.

And while I hate to sound like I’m complaining, Le Tholonet wasn’t that exciting or scenic, and I don’t think we missed much.

It felt like we travelled on all sorts of roads today: pretty ones, rural ones, places that felt like driving in Australia, busy roads, coastal roads, scenic roads, and through some bigger townships.

Because we were on the minor roads – the “N” roads and the “D” roads – there was the usual speeding up, slowing down, taking the 2nd exit from a roundabout, etc.

And before you knew it, we were out in the country again with rolling hills and grapevines as far as the eye could see. Some of the roads gave Claude a chance to give his horses a gallop, with several roads at 80km/h or 90km/h.

For quite some time on one of those roads I was stuck behind someone who – like me – was trying to stay on the speed limit.

My observation of France is that they have lots of speed cameras, but they warn you when one is coming up. So you see a sign that shows a car and something resembling radio waves engulfing it, and that seems to indicate that there may be a speed camera soon, although – like at home – that particular camera might not actually be in use at the moment.

There does not appear to be any mobile speed cameras, or hidden police cars. The police seem to be very transparent about when and where you are liable for a speeding ticket.

But despite the fact that in some places there are no speed cameras and everybody speeds, I still try to stick to the speed limit because I just don’t know what I don’t know.

So we were puddling along at about 78km/h in an 80km/h zone behind someone going at a speed that I was comfortable with, and there was a line of cars behind us. If I am holding up traffic, I try to pull over and let them all past, but the guy in front of me clearly hadn’t had that same thought.

Then suddenly the car immediately behind me – a black taxi – started flashing his lights and honking his horn at me, like the whole thing was my fault.

I can only assume that he felt I wasn’t being agressive enough because I hadn’t overtaken the slow dude, so he gave me a practical demonstration of how it is done. He pulled out into the path of oncoming traffic, and went screaming past us both.

Interesting. Not very safe, but interesting.

We had a notion that we would stop somewhere nice for lunch. We are skirting along the coast road down in the Côte d’Azur, and it seemed a bit silly not to stop at a seaside township for lunch.

Saint-Tropez was the place where we really wanted to stop, but all indications are that traffic there is pretty manic, and I didn’t need that additional stress. Neither did MBW as it turned out.

So MBW did some quick Googling and ChatGPTing, and Agay was suggested as a quiet, pretty little seaside township without the stress. And so Joséphine was given new instructions – take us to Nice via Agay.

We had left Aix-en-Provence around 9.00am and it was now close to 10.30am. We were puddling along quite happily, and I was practicing (in my head) all of the french words that I know: Bonjour, Au revoir, boulangerie, patisserie, croissant, baguette …

Me: “Do you think that we should look for a boulangarie nearby and stop for coffee and something to eat?”

So Joséphine got more new instructions. Find us a boulangerie.

And so it came to be that we found ourselves in the sleepy little hamlet of Besse-sur-Issole. A pretty little provincial village with medieval buildings, narrow streets, and people carrying baguettes.

My happy place 😀

It wasn’t entirely clear where we were supposed to go in Besse-sur-Issole, because the signage was confusing and Joséphine had been stood down for a while. So, without hesitation, we made our own decisions.

As it turns out, the first decision we made was a poor tactical decision. I completely misread the “no entry” sign, and found myself eyeball to eyeball with another driver who clearly understood the road rules and signs better than I did. And as luck would have it, the road was so narrow that there was absolutely no opportunity to pass each other, and one of us had to reverse.

That would be me 🙁

But on the bright side, in Besse-sur-Issole there is no flaring of nostrils, grinding of teeth, or honking of horns when a stupid Australian makes a tactical error.

We found the local public carpark, put on our jackets, and went off walking in search of the boulangerie. We turned onto a side street that led to the village square, and guess what we found?

Markets!

I don’t know how she does it …

A very quaint little town square with about a dozen local vendors selling all types of stuff, from bits of material and buttons, to a guy rotisserie-ing chickens and roasting potatoes.

We found the boulangerie and we bought some pastries for smoko, and a baguette for later (lunch).

One of the funny things here in France – particularly the rural areas – is that cafe owners don’t mind if you sit at one of their tables and eat stuff you’ve bought elsewhere, so long as you buy a drink from them.

Sitting outside at a cafe, drinking coffee and watching the world go by is one of those things that we love about France, but haven’t really had the chance to do because everyone here smokes at the outside tables.

But nobody was smoking, so we went in.

The young guy (30’s?) waiting tables said something in French which we didn’t understand, and I responded with my usual “Je ne parlez pas français”.

He responded with “That’s OK, I speak English. Where are you from?”

And so began a fascinating conversation with a guy who was born in Strasbourg (we are going there), spent some time in Nice (we are here tonight), and had spent 6 months in Sydney with his girlfriend, saving money to buy a car so that he could do a lap of Australia.

Unfortunately COVID put the kibosh on those plans and he returned to France, got married, and bought a restaurant in Besse-sur-Issole.

We ordered 2 coffees, ate our pastries, and watched the world go by. And he only charged us €5.00 for the two coffees.

Back in Claude, we continued towards Agay for lunch. We had made another tactical error by not using toilet facilities before departing Besse-sur-Issole, and we figured that we should find one before lunch.

I’ve mentioned before that there are normally toilets on the toll roads, but they are difficult to find in the villages. As luck would have it, we found one at the end (or start, depending on your perspective) of a toll road, so we stopped.

Public toilets are always a bit of a gamble, but these ones were OK. Not the best public toilets I’ve ever used, but not the worst either.

We passed through lots of little townships, many with that same commercial busy-ness feeling to them.

You will recall that we have been trying to stick with the “N” (National) roads because they are better, but we went through a small township called Le Muy where the “N” road was only one car width wide, and one-way.

Some of the places that we drove through felt like driving through Moorooka or Coorparoo, with car yards, McDonald’s, KFC, etc.

We saw a sign for a McDonald’s calling themselves “Les Arcs” (as in the “Golden Arches”) – which we thought was funny – only to discover that it was actually a McDonald’s in the township of Les Arcs.

Not as funny as we’d thought.

We made it to Agay at a bit after 1.00pm for a lunch of salami and cheese on a fresh baguette, sitting there in our warm jackets while watching kids running barefoot on the sand on one side of us, and a lady stripped down to her underwear and sunbaking on the beach on the other side.

The beaches were sandy, but nowhere nearly as nice as Queensland beaches.

After lunch, we loaded Claude up again and headed off on the last run to Nice, taking the coast road. The water was a beautiful blue and the coastline was amazing.

It felt just like driving the Big Sur in California – something that we did pre-COVID.

It wasn’t a fast trip, but it was a spectacular one.

The next big place that we went through was Cannes (as in “The Cannes Film Festival”) and we stopped amongst the Mercedes and Jaguars and took photos of the water.

Coming out of Cannes on the home run to Nice was a nightmare due to all of the roadworks.

I don’t know if there is a Guinness World Records category for the most wrong turns in one journey, but there should be. And I’m claiming it.

Joséphine was confused and uncertain with all of the roadworks. MBW and I sometimnes couldn’t agree on which was the 4th or 5th exit, and Joséphine fluffing around didn’t help any.

MBW found a better way to get to Nice by taking a toll road, but she swapped our phones over (for the navigation) at a crucial point entering a roundabout, and we took another wrong exit.

And then we found ourselves on a motorway. Which was OK, except …

Normally when you get on a motorway, you take a ticket when entering, and then pay the toll when leaving. But sometimes you find yourself at a toll booth at the entry to a motorway without a ticket.

And without a clue either, as it happens.

But this was a special one where you pay your toll at the start of the toll road.

So we paid, and continued on to Nice.

Nice is nice, but very busy. We knew that our apartment overlooks the water, so it will be close to the beach, but the traffic around that area was diabolical. We couldn’t find anywhere to park while we located Farzad (our host for tonight), so I dropped MBW off to look for him while I did loops.

I nearly had a low-speed head-on collision with another vehicle while turning. (MBW doesn’t know that BTW, so it will be news for her when she reads this).

But all worked out. MBW found Farzad, I successfuly navigated to the apartment’s carpark without scratching Claude, and we got into our apartment.

We ducked out to get some groceries so that we don’t starve, and we have now had dinner and coffee, and settling in for the evening.

Did I mention that our apartment overlooks the water?

I might never come home. Farzad is going to have to get me out of here with a crowbar.

Ciao

#Europe2025

Last night, we finished up with a half-baked idea about going to Marseille for the day. The idea itself was probably more than half-baked, but exactly how we were going to get there was still under discussion.

Somewhere between the end of last night’s blog and this morning, it developed into a fully cooked plan.

We’ve definately decided that we are going to Marseille for the day, and we have definately decided that we are leaving Claude at home for the day. We are going by bus.

Or buses, to be more accurate.

Taking the bus is the path of least resistance, where “least resistance” means “least stress”. For everyone.

The day started out as another cracker of a day. Warm, with a forecast high of 20, and sunny with blue skies. We both wore a long-sleeved tee-shirt today, and carried our puffer jackets in case it got cold.

So we hopped into Claude, and drove down to the local park and ride facility, and took the “A” bus into the city. The bus was pretty empty to start, but got more passengers as the trip progressed.

For those of you that know MBW, almost anything can set her off sneezing. Some dust, smoke, someone wearing stong perfume … you name it. And when she sneezes, we will let off 9 or 10 sneezes in quick succession.

Something set her off on the bus to the city, and she started sneezing. Another female passenger standing nearby pulled her scarf up over her nose and mouth, and gave us a dirty look like we were carrying the plague.

Once we got into the city, we bought a return ticket each from Aix to Marseille, a trip of about 30-40 minutes.

I’m not sure what the attraction is in Marseille, but they have a bus leave Aix for Marseille every 5-10 minutes for most of the day.

All reports that we have had are that traffic in Marseille is a bit silly, and we couldn’t see any point in putting ourselves (or our mental health) under any more stress than we needed to.

We got into Marseille at around 10.30am and needed to figure out how to get from the bus station to Port Vieux (the old port), down by the water by 11.00am. We decided to purchase an all day ticket again, because … well, just because.

So that is now 3 tickets that we are carrying around in our wallets, all of which we will need again later in the day. And all of which look … very similar.

The trip down to Port Vieux was interesting. Despite a sign expressly forbdding smoking on the bus, the driver was puffing on an e-cigarette for most of the journey. Multi-tasking at its best.

We got down to Port Vieux just before 11.00am, the starting time for our walking tour. We met up with Mattew, an Italian-born man who has lived in Belgium, but has now been living in Marseille for 7 years.

The group was only small – a couple of ladies from Turkey, a couple from Brazil, ourselves, and a few others that came from places I didn’t catch.

Mattew was interesting, and fortunately most of the history that he gave us aligned with the history that previous walking tour guides have given also.

Marseille was the first settled colony in France, colonised 2600 years ago. Mattew took us through all of the old streets and gave us the history.

There were attacks from Vikings, Romans, Nazis … maybe not in that order, but they all had a go at some time. And then there were kings that created problems, some of which met an untimely end.

I’m not going to try and repeat everything that he said. Let’s face it – I can’t remember what I had for breakfast, so there is no chance that I can regurgitate all of the dates and places and people that we learned about today.

While we started at the old port (Port Vieux), we finished at the new port. One of the places that we stopped at was Le Major Cathederal, which would have to be one of the biggest buildings that I have seen in my life.

I know that when we were in Avignon, I said that the Palais des Papes was the largest I have seen, but that was actually a number of buildings all joined and interconnected.

This was just one enormous church building. And the floor was covered with these tiny ceramic tiles that couldn’t have been more that 1cm x 1cm in size.

Once the tour ended at 1.00pm, we wanted to go and see the Basilique Notre-Dame de la Garde, a basilica that is built at the top of the hill overlooking Marseille, and offering stunning views over the city and the port.

I recall that one of the reasons that we left Claude behind today was to reduce stress, but that bus trip up to the basilica was one of the scarest trips I have ever done. Narrow, windy streets with cars parked just anywhere, and a bus which either didn’t have functioning brakes, or a driver that chose not to use them.

Seriously, he came around one corner so quickly, with a car parked illegally on the corner, and he must have avoided taking off the car’s side mirror by a hair’s breadth. Pretty scary stuff. Or pretty impressive … I’m not sure.

We got up there, took some photos, and then managed to catch the same bus back down the hill again. With the same driver, and the same stress.

We got back down to the new port and went in search of a very late lunch – it was after 2.00pm.

We found a boulangerie – we do like boulangeries – and bought a baguette with tomato and mozzarella on it. We also found a crepe shop and bought a Nutella crepe for dessert.

It was a pretty unusual experience speaking to the crepe guy in broken Frenglish, while the Bee Gee’s “How deep is your love” was blaring out of his tinny little radio.

By this time we’d decided that we had had enough of walking around. We checked with ChatGPT if we had covered off all of the important things to do on a day in Marseille, and other than a boat trip out to one of the islands, we had done it all.

Besides, I couldn’t manage yet another bus/ferry ticket in my wallet.

By now the weather was turning nasty. The wind had picked up and it was getting cold, and it was starting to spit with rain.

We made our way back to Port Vieux (the old port) to catch the metro back to the bus station, and then we caught a double-decker bus back to Aix-en-Provence.

My observation of Marseille is that it is a very busy, very commercial city. Unlike many of the smaller provincial villages that we have been through where everyone walks around with a baguette in their hand, nobody carries a baguette in Marseille.

Which is sad, really 😞

There is an over-representation of McDonald’s, Burger King, Domino’s Pizza and Haviana footwear shops around the city.

In fact, the further south that we have come, the less quaint and provincial the cities have become, and the more commercially-oriented.

Which is a shame, because I have loved the small villages we have been through.

My other observation is that the further south and east we have travelled, the less “French” it is. You can hear people speaking different languages (French, Italian, Arabic, Spanish) because all of those countries are so close to here, and people move around.

We got back to Aix around 5.00pm, and caught the bus back to the carpark to retrieve Claude. The bus home was one of those fancy new “100% electrique” buses. It was overcrowded when we got on, and rapidly progressed to seriously overcrowded, then dangerously overloaded.

I assume that there are rules here that say the driver cannot refuse any passenger a ride – unlike in Australia where the driver can determine that the bus is full, and just go sailing past bus stops.

The driver was not a happy man. There was a lot of gesticulating and muttering to himself things like “Mon dieu” and “Sacreblue”. It was a regular sardine express.

The bus was so full that the driver couldn’t get the front door to close because it kept getting jammed on people in the doorway. I was jammed between some tall dude and the windscreen, and not making the driver’s job any easier because I was blocking his view of the side mirror.

When finally many of the passengers got off and we could all breath again, the driver looked at me and started giving me his thoughts. He must have thought that a) I could understand him, and b) that I cared.

While I don’t know exactly what he said, I’m pretty sure that “what a bunch of morons” is delivered universally in any language.

But I gave him my most sympathetic “Je ne Parlez pas Français” and that was the end of that conversation … until we got off the bus at our stop and I said “Merci beaucoup” (thank you very much) to which he replied (in English) “have a great afternoon”.

We had no plans for dinner, so we decided to stop at a supermarket that we have seen on the way to parking each morning, and see what we can find.

Laurent and Dider’s AirBNB is tastfully decorated and well appointed, but it has very limited cooking facilities which limits our options for dinner.

MBW asked Joséphine to take us back to our accommodation in Nîmes, and off we went.

The more observant among you will note that we are not staying in Nimes, we are staying in Aix-en-Provence. Nimes was a few nights ago.

Interesting.

So that little snafu last night when we couldn’t find the Route Cézanne and we went on a big long 45 minute drive to nowhere may not have been entirely Joséphine’s fault … it’s possible that the problem originated in the front passenger seat …

We found the supermarket, and our limited options for dinner were limited even further with the limited options at the supermarket, but we ended up buying some seriously overpriced eggs, and utilised some of the stuff we already have in the fridge to make an omlette for dinner.

It’s been a great day in Marseille. Another big walking day – we have both done >13,500 steps – but it’s a good tired.

As I said earlier, I’m missing that quaintness of the little provincial villages that we have been through – the ones where you slow down to enter the village, and 2km later you speed up again as you exit it.

But Aix-en-Provence and Marseille have both been nice too.

Tomorrow we leave Laurent and Didier’s place and head to Farzad’s place in Nice for 4 nights. After that we are off into Tuscany, Italy. It feels like we have been travelling forever, but we still have 4 weeks to go.

I’ll let you know if I stop having fun.

Ciao

#Europe2025

I’ve had an epiphany and I have to confess that I feel pretty silly about it.

You will recall that yesterday I forgot to wind up the security screens and so we woke in the dark. I was also confused about the fact that when we did wake, it was still half-dark anyway which was unusual, and I’m pretty sure that I also commented that sunset didn’t occur here in Aix-en-Provence until 8.00pm or so.

It’s almost as though we have had a time shift of an hour … kind of like what happens when daylight savings kicks in.

So it turns out that on the last Sunday in March, all of France – and possibly all of Europe – commence daylight saving time, and clocks are pushed out by an hour. I had known that was going to happen, but I’d completely forgotten.

That explains a great deal of things.

We are here in Aix for three nights, so we have 2 full days to explore.

Today we had a walking tour planned with Benjamin (Benjy), meeting at the Tourist Office in the middle of Aix-en-Provence.

But before I do that, I’m going to wind back to yesterday afternoon after we arrived here. Two things of some note happened.

The first thing that happened was that we noticed a didgeridoo lying on the ground outside the cottage (tiny house) that we are staying in, and we assumed (incorrectly) that Didier was taking the micky out of us. We were having trouble with the lock on the door of the cottage and we had asked him to show us how it worked, and when he came over we asked him about the didgeridoo.

He looked at us blankly and said (in his strong french accent) that he had no idea what it was, that a friend had given it to him, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to do with it.

So I demonstrated how it is used (… very poorly, I might add …) we explained to him that it is quite valuable, and showed him some YouTube videos of aboriginals playing the instrument. He was so impressed that he took it inside for safe-keeping.

Or possibly to remove any opportunity for me to play it again.

The other thing that happened was that we were keen to get into the city yesterday afternoon, so we asked Didier what was the best way to do that, especially noting that it was a Sunday afternoon.

He told us to park at a particular parking station. So that’s what we planned to do.

I mentioned yesterday that Aix is much bigger than I expected it would be, but how hard can it be to get into the city, and get into a parking station, when you’ve got Google Maps as your wingman?

So off we went.

It soon became quite apparent that Aix is much bigger and much busier than we had anticipated, and at one stage I found myself in the position of being first off from a set of lights, turning left into the main street.

When in France, just remember “tight right, loose left”. How hard can it be?

Let me tell you that there is nothing quite so heartbreaking than taking a left turn into a street and realising that nobody behind you is following, but they are all going somewhere else. That will be because Claude found himself travelling along a bus lane, while all of the other vehicles took the correct turn and took the part of the road designated for cars.

Anyhow it was all sorted with a quick (and desperate) u-turn and I left it for Joséphine to figure out an alternative route to get us where we were going.

Which brings us to today. A walking tour starting from the centre of the city, near where we parked yesterday in the carpark.

Full of excitment and optimism, but no desire to drive back into the city and battle workday traffic … so we did some investigations and found that there was a Park-n-Ride facility about 6km away where we could park for €3.50 for the day in a secure, underground parking garage, and that price included the cost of my bus fare, plus the fare of any accompanying passengers in the car, and our fares back again this afternoon.

Much cheaper than parking in town, and much less stressful than driving. And probably cheaper than that fine for driving in a bus lane that will arrive in our letterbox in 6 months or so, after they track me down.

Remember that important detail – the parking station was about 6km and 6 minutes drive away from home. That will be important later.

We got Claude safely parked, found the bus stop, and got on. We arrived in town about 9.45am, with the walking tour with Benjy planned to start at 10.30.

We had a half-baked idea that we might make a trip down to Marseille tomorrow. The drive to Marseille will be nice, but what to do with Claude when we get there could be a problem, so we went into the Tourism Office and asked about the bus service to Marseille.

And so a plan was hatched to take Claude to the Park-n-Ride again tomorrow, take a bus into town, then get another bus from town (Aix) to Marseille. But that will be tomorrow’s news, because it could change.

It probably depends on whether we are still married.

After speaking with the Tourism Office, we had a quick poke around town and waited for Benjy to arrive.

Benjy was a surprise package. Young guy, and very, very British.

Not French. British. (The first thing that I inadvertently said to him was “You’re not very French!”)

Turns out that his mother is French and his Father is British. They met, married and moved back to Britain, and have now returned to Aix-en-Provence to retire.

(On a side note, he also said that his Grandfather was a Jew, but his Grandmother was French, so he is not a Jew, he is only Jew-ish. Boom, boom.)

And so Benjy shared his love of Aix-en-Provence with us. He also moonlights as an English teacher at the university in summer, and does walking tours the rest of the year.

An important clarification, though. I have always though that the pronunciation of “Aix” was “Axe”, but I’m wrong. The correct pronunciation is “X”. Or “Ex”.

X-en-Provence, like experience.

It was a really informative walking tour. He told us about the history of the area, when and why the Romans came in and took over (which goes a long way to explaining the Colosseums we have been seeing everywhere), who was in charge, and so forth.

He took us on a big rambling walk of the old French parts of the city, and then into the old(er) Roman parts of the city. He showed us the school where Paul Cézanne (artist) and Émile Zola (novelist) attended and were childhood friends.

Apparently nobody liked Cézanne’s paintings when he was alive, so nobody wanted them after he died. Well, nobody smart wanted them.

So (apparently) many of his paintings were sold to “stupid Americans” who thought that they were buying something special because it was “French”, and now all of the wealth of Cézanne’s paintings is held elsewhere, not in France.

The last “stupid American” who sold a Cézanne only got $260m for it …

He told us how there were many mansions built along the main street – Cours Mirabeau – by Generals and nobles, and that the bigger the doors that they have, the more prestigious they were.

He also showed us some really important stuff like where the best pizza shop is (and what to buy), and where the best patisserie is in Aix-en-Provence.

And we went to both for lunch, of course.

He told us some fun facts, like a boulangerie cannot call itself a boulangerie unless they actually bake the products on site. If they bring them in from elsewhere – even if it is their own bakery somewehere else – they can only call themselves a patisserie.

We also learned that while France has 3 principles – Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité – Aix-en-Provence actually have 5, adding Generosity and Probity.

And another fun fact: we learned that all cafes in Aix face south to pick up the sunshine, because the French love to sit outside at cafes and people-watch.

One of the things that France is known for is its cheese. But in this area of France, it is (apparently) too hot for cows, so goat’s cheese is a major product.

Following the walking tour, we went off in search of lunch. Benjy had recommended a pizza place called Lumberjack Pizza. Now, I know what you are thinking … we are in France and that doesn’t sound very French. And if we are going to eat pizza, we should wait for Italy. Right?

But we went there anyway, because we were told that they serve a goat’s cheese and lavender honey pizza – a speciality of the area.

And it was so good.

After lunch we just decided to do a bit of a wander around the streets of the old town and see what there is to see … but experience has taught us that a really good walking tour covers off everything we want to see, and all we can do is go back and take another look at some of the more interesting things.

I have spoken previously about the narrow streets and narrow footpaths. I have also spoken previously about the number of electric vehicles around because of the emission problems that they have in many of these towns and cities. All of that creates a new problem.

We were wandering aimlessly around the old city on streets with virtually no footpath, so we were walking on the streets. Electric cars make virtually no sound, so you get a bit of a surprise when a vehicle has come up silently behind you and honks their horn to get you off the street.

It was another cracker of a day. Blue skies, and a light breeze. By lunchtime it was pushing 20 degrees and we were down to short sleeves and carrying all of our jackets.

By about 3.00pm we had seen everything that we wanted to see, so we asked ChatGPT for a suggestion for a scenic drive around Aix, and it proposed a nice drive on the Route Cézanne, to Le Tholonet and Puyloubier.

They didn’t like Cézanne when he was alive. Now everything is named after him!

Remember earlier I said that we parked 6km and 6 minutes away from our AirBNB?

We asked Joséphine to take us on the Route Cézanne, setting our initial destination for Le Tholonet. That was a 20 minute trip in the countryside.

So off we went … a couple of wrong turns, a missed exit on the roundabout. Joséphine tells me to take the 4th exit from the roundabout, and I lose count going around the wrong way.

After one particular wrong turn, Joséphine announced that she was “recalculating” and that we should follow the A-something road for 15km, which seemed a bit far, but then with my appalling sense of direction, anything is possible.

It’s a funny thing driving on the right-hand side of the road because your mind starts to play tricks on you. You train youself that everything is back to front.

You use your left hand to operate the blinker.

You use your right hand to select the correct gear or release the handbrake.

You look to the right (not the left) to check your centre rear-view mirror.

And because you spend so much time telling yourself that everything is back-to-front, you start to make silly mistakes: a “turn right” announcement is translated to “turn left”.

“Be in the left lane” translates to “be in the right lane”.

Argh! So it might not all be Joséphine’s fault after all.

After a 45 minute loop around Aix, we found ourselves driving past the turnoff to our AirBNB which – you may recall – was 6km and 6 minutes from where we started at the Park-n-Ride.

Not to be beaten, we randomly picked a nearby township that looked interesting and set that as our destination.

The winner was Saint-Cannat – a sleepy little township of 1,500 people where nothing ever happens.

Except for today.

I’m fairly certain that every single one of them was out in their vehicle, either parked (or double-parked), or driving around the township collecting their kids from school.

On the bright side, we got cheap fuel for Claude, and I snapped a picture of a McDonald’s with a green and yellow sign.

We decided to head for home. We got back a bit after 5.00pm, and MBW did another load of washing.

Our impression of Aix is that it is a very pretty, and very clean city. Bigger than we expected, but a beautiful spot to visit and spend a few days.

Last night we were pretty excited to find “Outback Truckers” on one of the many channels on the TV in our AirBNB. But sadly it was all overdubbed with French, so we couldn’t follow along.

We need to do some more planning for our trip to Marseille tommorow and weigh up the stress of driving there, versus the convenience of getting there quicker than public transport.

Unless of course we make another tactical error and end up on the A8 and find ourselves heading back towards Paris.

Don’t laugh.

Ciao

#Europe2025

I did something silly this morning. Actually, I did something silly last night that caused me to do something silly this morning.

Many of the places that we have stayed have external metal shutters on the windows – I assume for security and privacy. There is a handle inside the window that you use to wind the shutters up and down.

Yesterday afternoon we got home mid-afternoon and had a bit of a lazy afternoon. We had walked 15,000-20,000 steps each day for the last couple of days and we were tired.

I did some blogging while MBW read her book and watched The Rookie.

When it started to get dark, I rolled down the shutters in the lounge room of our apartment. Not long after, when I went for a shower, I rolled down the one in the bedroom also.

Normally we don’t wind them all the way down to ensure that we can get some light in, but I wasn’t really paying attention.

I’ve been sleeping really well here at Kate’s place in Nîmes. Not everywhere that we have stayed has a matress and pillow that agrees with me, but Kate got it right, and I have been sleeping like a baby.

I’m alseep within seconds of my head hitting the pillow, and I don’t wake all night until about 7.00am when the sun comes up.

Last night was no different, except that I woke really early this morning. Maybe 4.30 or 5.00am because it was still very dark. I was really annoyed because I have been sleeping so well, and now I’ve woken early.

I looked at my phone to discover … that it was 7.00am. Those stupid roller shutters … I had wound them both all the way down and forgotten to wind them up before bed.

Not a great start to the day 🙁

There was a little bit of confusion with our booking at Kate’s apartment in Nîmes. For reasons that I don’t understand, she had us moving out this morning and more guests moving in this afternoon, and nobody was available to clean the unit between guests. So she asked how we felt about cleaning the unit before we departed.

Interesting concept.

In any case, before I had the opportunity to respond to say “isn’t that what I’m paying a cleaning fee for?”, she said that she had solved the problem.

It turns out that she convinced the people coming in after us to clean the apartment, make the bed, get out new linen, etc.

All power to them!

So we packed all of our stuff and gave the place a good wipedown anyway, and threw away the rubbish.

We were pretty early, so we both went for a walk to retrieve Claude from the parking station a few blocks away and bring him back to pack, and head off.

Once again, MBW headed off in completely the wrong direction to find the carpark, and once again we arrived at exactly the correct location (stairs down to the carpark) to collect Claude.

I don’t know how she does it.

I’ve mentioned how narrow the streets are. And the carpark ramps. And – it turns out – the spaces in the underground carpark. So narrow that if you park normally, you are at serious risk of being unable to get into your car when you need to, without being a contortionist.

I can’t even touch my toes, so there is no way in God’s little green earth that I will be able to twist myself inside out to get into Claude.

But when I parked Claude the other night after our drive, I jagged a once-in-a lifetime parking space at the end of a row between two posts. Wide enough to be a wheelie space, without actually being a wheelie space.

I checked. Twice.

Back to the apartment, and – once again – there was absolutely no street parking available outside, so I did the old double park and hazard lights trick.

When in Rome …

I parked across the front entrance to the apartment block figuring that it wouldn’t be a problem … and a sweet old man came up and clearly wanted to get into the front door of the building, and couldn’t. So I moved Claude and we (MBW and I) had a nice chat with him.

We established very quickly that he could not speak any language that we spoke, and likewise we could not speak any language that he spoke.

I gave him my very best “Je ne parlez pas Français” (I don’t speak French), and he smiled at me like I was an idiot. So maybe he doesn’t speak French either … ?

So we had a lovely conversation – both of us speaking our own language, and neither of us understanding what the other was saying … but there was lots of smiling and nodding.

In any case, he seemed absolutely delighted with the outcome of the conversation, and I was concerned that I may have inadvertently promised him MBW’s hand in marriage, or I may have promised to service his car for him.

Who knows.

But he toddled up the stairs, and it seems that he is our neighbour … so maybe he was just pleased that we were moving out.

We loaded up Claude, asked Joséphine to take us to Arles (en route to Aix-en-Provence), and off we went.

Lots and lots of cars parked in Nîmes on a Sunday morning, but not a soul to be seen on the streets. You could have fired a cannon up the main street and not hit anyone.

Which meant a quiet, pleasant and stress-free trip out of Nîmes and towards Arles, our first stop for the day.

Unfortunately, for any number of reasons, we forgot to instruct Joséphine that we had plenty of time today and we wanted to go the scenic route. We were leaving around 9.15am, it was a <2 hour drive to Aix via the “no tolls” option, and we couldn’t check-in to tonight’s accommodation until 4.00pm.

We turned up at a toll booth, realised our error, took a ticket, and did some low-altitude flying down to motorway to Arles.

A few comments on French toll booths.

Firstly, you have to stop at the boom gate, pay your fee, and wait for the gate to go up. That’s pretty disappointing after you have been doing 130km/h for the last little while. I can still remember when they introduced coin baskets on the Gateway Bridge, and you needed to stop and throw your coins in. Even then I thought that the need to actually stop was pretty archaic … yet they still do it here in France, even if you have an eTag.

Secondly, some of their toll booths are as big as a Roman Colosseum – with lots of gates for payment, that all merge back into 2 lanes at the other side, creating chaos.

And finally, I have seen a couple of times now Police waiting for people to come through the toll gates, and then get taken aside for some kind of interview. I don’t know what they have done wrong, and it hasn’t happened to me (yet), but I guess it’s only a matter of time.

Arles is a pretty little town, and quite dead on a windy Sunday morning. We drove around aimlessly for a while, then stopped in a parking station briefly to consult with ChatGPT for the top 5 things to do in Arles.

It turns out that the top 5 include a number of things that aren’t exactly in Arles, but some way away, and the other option is a Roman Arena in beautiful condition.

Forgive me, but once you’ve see one Roman Colosseum, you’ve seen them all. I would never be so flippant about baguettes or pastries, but Roman Colosseums … hmmm.

So we did some shopping in Monoprix – our other favourite place to shop for things that we don’t need – and then asked Joséphine to take us towards Marseille instead. Marseille is down on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea (I think), with a planned lunch stop at Port de Carro, a little seaside town.

The road was different to anything that we have seen before in France. It was the most like Queensland that we have seen, and we could have been driving down in Northern NSW near Cabarita Beach. Open spaces, scrubby vegetation, sparse landscape.

When we arrived at Port de Carro, it was just like driving through Coolangatta. There were surf shops, people wearing thongs, little shops … and of course a boulangerie.

We stopped in and bought a warm baguette and a citrus cream-filled pastry thing (see photo below) for lunch, then drove around the corner and sat on a park bench that felt very much like Kirra or Coolangatta, and ate our lunch. Salami, cheese, tomato, and mayo on a fresh warm baguette, followed by pastry and coffee.

If eating warm baguettes and pastries for lunch everyday is wrong, then I don’t want to be right 🙁

So good.

After lunch we went for a bit of a walk around the beach and watched some crazy French people in their swimmers enjoying the water. The water was so blue and clear, but I imagine it was cold too.

But tucked into that little corner of the beach out of the wind, it was very nice. I almost felt like taking my shoes off and having a paddle.

I’ve learned a new French expression today, and you never know when it could come in handy.

On our little walk we found a fully automatic public toilet (don’t ask) which can speak french better than I can. Inside was a sticker with two options:

1. Débit important (big flush), and
2. Débit faible (little flush)

It’s always good to learn new things.

By now it was around 1.00pm and we had seen everything we were going to see without going back to Arles for the Roman collesseum.

We messaged our hosts for tonight (Laurent and Didier) and asked if there was any chance that we could drop our bags off early and go off exploring … and they said yes.

So we headed to our accommodation for tonight which – in the interests of full transparency – is nothing like what we expected. It is essentially a tiny home behind Laurent’s home, way out in the country at the end of a narrow lane.

But it’s clean and comfortable and Laurent and Didier are very friendly and helpful.

We dropped off our bags, and went back out to do some exploring in Aix-en-Provence. It turns out that Aix-en-Provence – while a very pretty town – is also nothing like what we expected.

We were thinking that it would be a quaint little country town with all of the local grandmas selling home made jam in the quiet main street … but it is a very vibrant and busy township (population 150,000 people) with a beautiful main street. And it felt like all 150,000 of them were out enjoying the beautiful weather.

You will recall that I’ve been saying how cold it has been? It was 22 degrees walking in town this afternoon and very sunny. Not a cloud in the sky – an absolute cracker of a day!

Way too good to be working.

We had a bit of a wander and noticed that the closer we get towards Italy, the more Italian influence we see. But we want to put off eating pizza, pasta and gelato until we reach the promised land 🙂

We bought some groceries for dinner, and headed home around 5.15pm for a coffee and a rest.

Tomorrow we have a walking tour of the city, and by then we will have better bearings for what else to do the following day (Tuesday) on our own.

Laurent & Didier have a washing machine available, so MBW has made a pre-emptive strike and done a load of washing to reduce the chances of another underwear crisis.

It’s 6.00pm now. The sun doesn’t set until 8.02pm tonight, and it’s still warm outside (19 degrees), so I might slap on some coconut oil and go outside and work on my tan.

Ciao

#Europe2025

Something strange has happened. Something very strange indeed, and I can’t explain it.

When I got dressed this morning in my favourite jeans and we went out walking to find the bus stop, my jeans were loose. Not falling down around my knees loose, but loose enough to be annoying.

Loose enough that I needed to tighten my belt an extra notch.

Why is this strange?

Well, if you were to go back and count the number of times that I’ve mentioned the words boulangerie , or croissant, or baguette (… and please don’t do that, by the way …) I suspect that I have eaten enough to cause my GP some serious concern.

And yet my jeans are loose.

I can’t really explain that except to suggest that the 15,000-20,000 steps that I (and we) are doing most days is having more of an effect than all of those baguettes and croissants that I have eaten.

I’ve mentioned previously that it appears to be a national pastime here in regional France to walk around with a fresh, warm baguette in your hand. And why wouldn’t you? They are cheap (about €1.10 each), and so, so good.

And when you think that there is a boulangerie in every township you travel through, it is hardly surprising.

Remember yesterday, we stopped at a boulangerie in the middle of nowhere and bought lunch at some time after 1.00pm? The baker (if that’s what he is called) was in the process of making more baguettes. They bake them all day long, and often don’t close until 7.00pm when they stop selling them.

Sure, you can buy them in the local Monoprix or E.Leclerc. They are a bit cheaper, but mass produced and nowhere near as good.

I’m seriously going to have to find a French bakery (boulangerie) when we get back home. Seriously.

So today – Saturday – we had a walking tour with Bastian.

To be completely honest, we’d forgotten about it, but when we got a reminder of the time and place, we made plans.

Figured out how to get to the starting place in town. Bus was our most likely option.

Wouldn’t it be nice if every township in France with a bus service used the same system. Lyon uses TCL. Nîmes uses Tango.

So we had breakfast and headed out. The temperature was cool (9 degrees that felt like 7 degrees), so we packed scarves and jackets and asked Google Maps to take us to the bus stop, about a 4 minute walk away. It was also forecast to be windy.

Once again, I have no sense of direction here. The streets are all narrow and just seem to go in every direction. I feel like we should be heading one way, and Google Maps says to go a different way.

But we got to the bus stop and the bus pulled in, right on schedule. The number 9 bus.

We got on, and I gave the lady bus driver my best smile and said “Je ne parlez pas Français” (I don’t speak French). I then showed her my preprepared Google Translate screen saying I wanted 2 all day bus tickets, please.

Transaction completed, and we were on our way.

You know how I have been saying how scary it is driving down these narrow streets in Claude, and trying not to hit anything? The lady bus driver did it in a bus. Same streets, but in a bus. And I’m pretty sure that it was a banana bus.

She must have nerves of steel.

Everything is close here in Nîmes. We only went 3 stops and we were in the city.

We were about 45 minutes early, so we poked around, took a few photos, and got a coffee to sustain us … and warm us up.

Bastian turned up right on time, along with a young Italian guy who went to school in France, so was fluent in Italian, French and English.

Don’t you just hate a show-off?

The final couple turned up – John and Grace from Oregan (USA) – so that made Bastian plus 5 of us. John and Grace had just retired, so were about the same age as us.

Experience with these “free” Get Your Guide walking tours is mixed. I say “free” because you pay what you think it is worth. Many of the guides we have had previously look like they shop at a 2nd hand clothes shop and sleep on the street. And consequently we have probably over-donated to them because we feel sorry for them, not because they did a great job.

But Bastian was the best that we have ever had. He was friendly (shook hand all around and asked us to introduce ourselves), well dressed, fluent in English, and addressed us all as “my friends”.

His octagonal glasses frames were a bit weird, but who am I to judge.

He was interesting, engaging and happy to answer questions. Probably being in a small group helped too, because some groups have been up to 20 people.

He showed us lots of interesting monuments around the city and explained the significance of each. He took us through quirky, narrow streets and showed us all sorts of interesting things.

He took us to the food markets, and showed us all of the best things to buy for lunch.

He also showed us a shop that sells a blue fabric that was invented in Nîmes. Denim.

He explained that the word denim is a joining of “de Nîmes” (of Nîmes). BTW I checked on Wikipedia, and it was confirmed. If you can’t trust Wikipedia, who can you trust?

He explained about the aquaduct, and the original water source in Nîmes.

It was a really informative tour and we gave him an extra tip 🙂

By the time that the tour was over (12.00pm), we were getting hungry so we headed back to the markets to buy some of the things that he suggested.

These little pies that are stuffed with fish and octopus. Plus something called “brandade” which is like a dip, but made of poached fish (cod) and oil, and mixed with milk and garlic, which we ate on a fresh baguette.

We also found some “pomme beignets” which is like a pineapple fritter but made with apple (pomme) and covered with sugar.

We found a park bench in one of the town squares, and ate our lunch.

Do you remember I said that the forecast was windy? It was almost cyclonic, and the wind must have been blowing straight from the artic circle – it was freezing.

And when I say that the wind was almost cyclonic, I’m not kidding.

Just near us when we were eating lunch, there was a toy shop with a stand of bikes and toys on display outside the shop. It blew over.

There was also a restaurant with outdoor tables and chairs, and we watched (with some amusement) as the wind was blowing tables and chairs over, while the waiter was frantically trying to reset them all back up again.

In the end he just stacked and chained them together so that they wouldn’t all blow away.

The other thing that we really wanted to see was the arena. It is like the Colosseum but smaller, and built in the same style. And built in the 1st century.

Of interest, while it is an ancient Roman monument, it is still used today for various events including singers such as Elton John.

While we were there, they were setting it up for an upcoming tennis tournament.

I’m not going to try to explain it … it was simply enormous. Look at the photos.

We were hoping that there might have been some executions planned for today, or even some people being fed to the lions … but there was nothing scheduled 🙁

We spent an hour or so doing a self-guided tour of the arena.

When we were up at the very top level, we were genuinely concerned that the wind was going to blow us off, so we headed back down and finished the tour.

WH&S was clearly not a priority 2000 years ago. But then I guess when you watch gladiators fight each other to the death, and feed Christians to the lions, losing a few invited guests over the edge probably isn’t too much of an issue.

We’d had a great day looking around Nîmes, but by 3.00pm we were done and ready to head back to the apartment.

It was cold and very windy, and becoming unpleasant.

We found a Monoprix and bought some stuff for dinner, then found a bus that dropped us off near home, and had a quiet afternoon/night in.

Dinner and the last episode of Reacher, and we are ready for bed. Another 15,000 steps today.

Tomorrow we pack up, collect Claude, and ask Joséphine to take us to Aix-en-Provence. This is a little place that I absolutely insisted that we stay in on this trip.

We will make a couple of stops on the way at other places that ChatGPT says we really must see.

Three nights in Aix, 4 nights in Nice, and then we are heading into Italy to buzz around Tuscany for a while. I’m going to have to learn how to say “I don’t speak Italian …:

Ciao

#Europe2025