To Cassis with Karen

We caught the bus to Nice airport where we were picked up and taken to collect our car. It is a silver-grey Citroen C3 and after installing Karen, we headed off towards Cassis, which is about a 2-hour drive on the freeways south-west of Nice. We were going to call our car Robert - a sophisticated French version of Bobbie, but have decided to just call him C3. We were fairly nervous about driving on the wrong side of the road at first but managed to negotiate the trip with only 1 motorist getting angry and flashing his lights at us. Travel tip No.5 - Set your rear-vision mirrors before you hit the freeway. Karen navigated us right to our hotel door and, despite some initial jealousy on Fran’s part, the three of us are now inseparable driving companions.

View from our hotel window

Cassis is a small fishing village - 8,000 inhabitants - on the coast just east of Marseille, although from what we’ve seen so far it is more a tourist town. Once again, Fran’s research paid off and our hotel, although old, is right next to the quay, the port and the beach. Our room is on the corner of the building so our views are of all three, where there is a continuously changing montage of people, boats, cars and motor bikes.

It seems the people of Cassis are wary of people like us and have erected signs to warn us about our lack of style.

In fear of being run out of town, Fran decided that we antipodeans need more sophistication. So it’s goodbye Kathmandu Girl and Akubra Adrian. Fran hopes, like the transformation of Eliza Doolittle, to become Francoise, while Adrian has decided to assume a James Bond persona. Unfortunately, since he is more like Peter Sellers than Sean Connery, the outcome is more likely to be Pink Panther than 007. As the first step in the transformation Adrian now sports a tres chic hat that is a cross between the hats worn by Ian Chappell and Tony Greig, while Fran has a new 2-piece swimsuit that doesn’t go baggy when it gets wet.

We took a boat trip to the Calanques (small fjords) and later walked to the first of about 8 calanques. The walk was much better as the calanque cut back inland for hundreds of metres which we were not able to see from the boat. Weather was OK but a strong wind blew all day one day and the next was cloudy.

Au Revoir