Day Twentyeight - Jun 18, 2012
Marseille, France
Daily Didactic
Marseille is an under appreciated little town of a million. Read as you might, you won't find a lot of advice on what to do here even for one day (which is what it is for us, to break up a long train trip to Barcelona). Far be it for us to argue, and today we followed the conventional wisdom that from Marseille you need to visit Arles, Avignon, or Aix en Provence. Each have pretty militant advocates online, so we picked Aix en Provence because it was the shortest train ride. It has two general attractions, being the home of artist Cezanne and being a beautiful little French village. We stopped at the Tourism Bureau and picked up Cezanne walking tour map. While the walking tour seemed a little over-eager (including the homes of childhood friends of Cezanne or poets that were alive at the same time), it did walk us all over the very quaint and pretty little village. We stumbled across possibly the best lunch we've had in weeks (that was not pizza, we've had plenty of good pizza) and eventually jumped the train back to Marseille in the late afternoon. On the advice of the nice young man working the Vertigo front desk we walked down to the Old Port and caught a bus up to the Cathedral Notre Dame. If there is one thing we would rather do less than drive in most of the places we've been, it would be driving a bus. Good lord. The views from the hill top church were spectacular. After gazing panoramically for a while, we caught the bus back to the port and walked back to our digs. We spent another relaxing night enjoying our view and called it an earlier night for a morning train ride to Barcelona.
Today's Photos
