Bel Azur Bandol

... even a few unaccompanied women sneak past.

After I've had enough excitement for the evening I walk back to the station to wait out the rest of the night. Its only 2am, so I've got some time to kill. I end up talking with an old man who is standing in front of the station smoking a cigarette. After a brief chat, he invites me back to his place to wait for my train. He seems friendly enough, and the prospects of waiting in the cold for three more hours aren't ...

... stay at this lovely lady’s home and forward onto Italy from another port
2) change destination to another port on Corse where there are more options for forwarding onto Italy
3) wait 2 days until there is a direct ferry from Marseille to italy (the one we thought we were on)

In the end we decided on No. 2. I was actually thankfull for once of Brian’s obsessive earliness as ...

NO MARSEILLE for us!!! The captain went by when we had 21 foot waves and winds of 50 gusting to 65. It was sunny but not good enough to dock in Marseille, so on to Barcelona we go. In spite of it, we had a great relaxing day and i had a 3 hour nap this afternoon. Naps are totally not my thing but apparently i was exhausted from our whirlwind schedule. Anyway, nothing exciting. We have seen numerous people in arm slings and just ran into a woman in a ...

So we left St Tropez to head towards Avignon. I wanted to drive along the coast and we found a little road to take us there.. Little alright! It was about 11 or 17km of narrow winding steep roads. The worst part was the cars we occasionally ran into coming the other way and the big drop on the other side!
But it was all worth it. We found all these beautiful little beaches. We stopped at one and ...

... as if they omit bathrooms strictly as a matter of space. So I’ve got the bell tower room, high above the street and across from the Gare St. Charles, watching people come and go at all hours. I don’t have TV, but I do have Tinariwen on my buzz-box.

This room could probably be dubbed the ‘suicide suite’ if it weren’t so small, given its high perch five stories over the street far ...

... even open at that hour. But if I’d known my midnight bus would be late, I’d have chosen differently. In the meantime I make friends with a Spanish-speaking Algerian who’s a jazz fan and asks me questions about Chet Baker that I can’t answer. We pass some time in chit-chat until I finally give up the ghost and try to cop some zzzz’s, bus or not. What really worries me is all the student-age population also lined up for the ...

... men in their flowing robes were milling about and young Arab guys were cruising around in convertibles with the latest in dance music blasting. What was conspicuously absent though were the women.

I know there is absolutely nothing here in Marseille to draw a tourist and I am only here because of 6 Euro plane tickets but it was nevertheless a fascinating stop. Provence and the Cote d'Azur are actually where the action is ...

(Smig) We awoke friday morning to a bit of noise below us and discovered that the Farmers Market was going full tilt, so we headed out into the Cassis morning and toured the market. It had provencale table clothes, clothes, all kinds of food, even grapes the size of kumquats. (They were amazing) fresh fish, fruits de rer & anything you would want. We had to get moving though as we had an appointment to make. We were ...

... and must be an accomplished tuba player. Jokes aside, it looked near impossible to find a family suited to what I was prepared to do and so my profile was short and straight to the point compared to the others: Australian in Marseille, to start immediately. Amazingly, this tactic worked a treat and it had caught the eye of Monsieur Pierre Sigg, a swiss businessman from Geneva who spent his summers with his family at ...

well folks,things were a bit hectic for me this evening!! could not get the night train to barcelona because of the rain from Nice in France, when i arrived to the station after spending a rainy day in Nice, I see all these people pratically sleeping on the fllors and I thought oh no, this is not a good sign, but it hadnt really rained that bad I mean I am used to the FLorida rainy season so it ...