France

Today we packed up (again) and left Lyon for Beaune. Our train didn’t leave until 1:25 pm so we grabbed a couple of pain-au-chocolat and wandered around Lyon. It was another beautiful morning, as our luck with the weather continues. There was a large open air market down by the river, it was nice to wander through the stalls. Lots of local produce, but some of it was imported and not local.

We started off by eating breakfast at our hotel this morning. Usually, we’ve been grabbing a croissant/pan-au-chocolat in the morning but we decided to grab a bite here before heading out. We headed north a bit using the Lyon metro system. It’s very clean, easy to navigate and comprehensive. We walked for a bit and ended up at a silk shop where everything is hand made. We were treated to a guided tour by a young lady who speaks english.

When I was originally planning the France portion of our trip, Lyon wasn’t on the itinerary. I was planning a few days in Chamonix but couldn’t practically swing it on the train. It would have involved a few transfers and some long layovers and in the end, I opted to swap out the Chamonix part for Lyon. Knowing now that driving in France isn’t such a big deal, I probably would have just kept the car for the entire two weeks that we are not in Paris and skipped the train.

Today was a travel day as we say au revoir to Aix-En-Provence and bonjour to Lyon. I can’t say that I loved Aix. It was fine but it was a bit far away from the heart of provence where I wanted to explore a bit easier and it was a bit big and hard(ish) to navigate around/in. Don’t get me wrong, it was a nice enough place and we enjoyed our time there but it won’t go down as someplace we would need to go back to anytime soon.

We headed up to Avignon for the day today. It’s an hour north of Aix, mostly on the autoroute so the navigation was pretty easy. Avignon is most known for being the papal residence from 9 March 1309 until 13 January 1377. The centre of the roman catholic church was not in Rome during this time. The palace of the popes is a very impressive building that was constructed in 20 years.

We hopped in the car again today to explore a bit of the Provence countryside. It’s a fairly large area and one could take many months (years?) to explore all the nooks and crannies that is Provence. Our foray isn’t that ambitious so today we wanted to have a look at Roussillon and L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue We headed out of Aix on the autoroute for a few km before exiting and driving some of the back roads of Provence.

We planned to take today a bit easy and Aix complied with us. We needed to change rooms at our hotel as I had originally booked for three nights instead of four and they couldn’t keep us in the same room. Our new room is larger and has a kitchenette. It must have been an apartment/flat at some point in it’s existence. It has a refrigerator and a cook top. We decided to head to a small grocery store and pick up some soup and bread for lunch.

It is with some sadness, that we bid the Hotel Welcome and the charming little village of Villefrance-sur-mer adieu but it’s time to hit the road for Provence. We decided to take the scenic route today. We could have driven the auto-route all the way from Nice to Aix in about one and half or two hours. Instead we decided to head through the mountains and see the French Grand Canyon.

We decided to head into Nice today for a bit of a look around before we head to Provence tomorrow. Nice is a pretty large city and is just a few minutes down the road from our little paradise in Villefrance-sur-mer. We bought two tickets on Nice’s version of a hop-on-hop-off bus tour called Nice’s Grand Tour. There is audio commentary on a double decker bus that drives by many of the interesting sights that Nice has to offer.

After a relaxing day on the beach yesterday, we decided to get a bit more adventurous and drive to Monaco for a few hours. The first order of business was to get the car from the parking lot. Parking in Europe is expensive. Like crazy expensive. It cost us 65 for a day and a half. Don’t do the conversion, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know ;). Monaco is not far from Villefrance, around 20 km or so.