Day 31: Marseille

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Did I mention how dreadful finding directions is to anywhere. Cars travel bumper to bumper, street signs are either minute, discrete or non existent, road works compound the chaos and we have a route to our hotel or wherever that is good but hard to navigate with all these factors. Extremely stressful! We spend quite some time getting out of tunnels and tolls we never wanted to take…..or end up the right street, but the wrong end with no way of getting back.

Today was more relaxing with Billy fuelled up on KitKats and apple juice for breakfast. We happily traveled through the French provinces and went high up to Mount Faron; looking over the French Riviera the Mediterranean and the city of Toulon. We traveled down and up the top in a cable car holding about 12 people. Billy was apprehensive but in the end laughed and cheered as we glided along. The view was beautiful and we decided we liked Toulon.

looking over the French Riviera the Mediterranean and the city of Toulon

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Personally the drive up here was pretty scary in the little Peugout, Will navigating the hairpin bends on a narrow one-way road that probably wouldn’t fit a 4WD, clinging to the hillside with no barrier on the way up – just a drop of a few hundred meters.

The guys checked out a War Museum while I checked out the one souvenir shop with a nice old lady singing to me, something about cicadas??…ahhh…didn’t buy anything…. Thus I sat in the car writing this without purchasing an apron or tea towel.

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The War Museum was actually quite impressive, some great shots of WWII and a lot of memorabilia and models. There were quite a few torpedos, bombs and missiles. Billy spent his time there picking a weapon and decided which plane, boat or sub it was fired out of.

After that it was back down the mountain (surprisingly the way back down did have barriers) and onto Marseille.

Having spent our usual hour plus finding the hotel and getting very frustrated (how a 4-way roundabout can have a street of the same name in every direction I’m not sure), we arrived in Marseille on the coast. A quick swim in the pool and it was getting late. Our usual late night of shopping, eating, watching CNN, trying to connect to the internet and Will learning our GPS to help him navigate through the horrid traffic system (which seems to completely lack decent road name signs) and then to bed. We have a lot of distance to travel tomorrow if we stick to our itinerary.