Aix En Provence

Trip Start Sep 03, 2008

Trip End Nov 13, 2008

Loading Map

Map your own trip!

Map Options

Show trip route

Hide lines

Flag of France Aix-en-Provence, Provence, France
Thursday, October 30, 2008

Toddy is gone - long live Toddy..On the 28th of November we handed back the keys to Toddy, and there was a small tear in my eye. Silly perhaps, but Toddy had enabled Shellie and I to explore bits of Europe, and experience Europe from a ``locals'' perspective, something you just cannot achieve sitting in a tour-bus or being restricted to only getting to places you can get to by bus and/or train. We ended up putting just over 4,000km on Toddy over the 28 days we had her; our experiences included dealing with peak hour in Prague, the serenity of the Dolomites, the ocean views provide by the French Riviera, the twists and turns of the French/Italian Alps and the flat-out speed of the German Autobahns. The Peugeot was fantastic, providing us with excellent fuel economy of about 5.2ltrs per 100kms; quite respectable for a new engine.We were scheduled to drop off Toddy at Marseille Provence Airport; so we decided to stay in Aix En Provence, which is closer than Marseille to the Airport (more on that later). The experience of spending the last week or so without an Internet connection made us decide to plan the remaining of our accommodation needs. In our exploration of Aix En Provence we came upon a cafe where, for the cost of a coffee, you could use their WiFi - no limits. Compared to the cost pattern on Internet we had experienced so far, this was a great deal.Aix En Provence is a wonderful small city; the old-town is a maze of alley-ways and shops. It was raining much of the time during our explore, however we did manage to find quite a few little shops, as well as a place to print out our plane tickets; a requirement seeing as we booked everything online. It certainly didn't have the number of people we saw in Nice, which was good; Shellie and I are not big-town people.So what is the plan - well it is to fly (Ryanair) to Marrakech on 30-October, staying there four nights, then moving to Essouria for three nights, then Casablanca for three nights, then Paris four nights, then home. Shellie and I are looking forward to the Moroccan part of the trip having spend almost two weeks in Italy and France.All that said, it is worth nothing that Marseille Provence Airport is actually about 45 km from Marseille. A trap for the unprepared should they arrive in Marseille then find they have to stump up for more travel to get to Marseille. The terminal we are in for our flight to Marrakech is the MP2 terminal, a terminal purpose built for low-cost airlines including Ryanair, Jet4You, BMIBaby.com, EasyJet, German Wings & MVAir.com.The terminal is very basic; comprising of concrete floors (polished) with limited white metal chairs around the edge of the terminals for people to sit in. There is a coffee shop, and not much else. This makes sense as most budget airlines, in order to keep their cost profile low, would not be interested in paying the maintenance costs for a traditional airport terminal.As Ryanair charges quite a bit for excess baggage above your 15 kg limit (15 euro / kilo or part there of) we did a test weigh on one of the check-in scales; 13.7kg for mine and 13.9kg for Shellie. We were quite impressed, although we did do a purge of stuff (excess paper etc) while in the hotel in Aix En Provence; and we did a test weigh prior to the airport using an improvised scale made with shopping bags and a coat-hanger. We used measured groceries such as 1kg of cereal; our estimates were only 300g off, not bad! Our return trip from Morocco is with Jet4You who have a 20kg limit, so we will be able to buy some stuff in Morocco should we desire it!Sitting in the airport for a while awaiting your boarding call does provide the opportunity to watch was is going on, well at least those of us who are not knitting. For example, we watched as a Ryanair flight to Agadir (Morocco) was processed. Occasionally people would leave that queue after reaching the check-in point and move to another queue closer to where we were sitting; it appeared the second queue was an ``Issue queue''. We saw a few small families refused flights; we don't know why because our French is not that strong; it could have been less than 6 months on a passport, a spelling error on the ticket, almost anything. C'est Tragic! Watching the staff in the queue work to resolve (or be seen to be resolving) the issue was quite comical. Often the body language was ``that is the way it is, deal with it''. We didn't see many people leave the ``resolution'' queue happy. Hopefully we would not suffer the same fate.Well we didn't (I was just trying to create some suspense). We actually sailed through the check-in process, although at the security check-point Shellie did have to surrender some water and a tub of yogurt. The chairs in the waiting area are more comfortable than those in the foyer for the terminal; same basic chair, just padded with leather cushions. Next stop, Marrakech!