Today we are in Toulon, France. The weather for the last couple of days has not been as good as had been forecasted for the first few days of the cruise that we had seen before we had left from Rome. It has been both cloudier and cooler than was in the forecasts, certainly not as warm as we had wanted.
This morning was no different, the forecast for today was for partly cloudy skies, a high of about 65 degrees, and with a chance of afternoon rain. Nonetheless, we were looking forward to visiting Cassis again, we had really enjoyed being there three years ago. However, the weather then was not much better than what we are expecting for today, maybe it will be a little warmer this time since we were here in late November in 2013.
The wake up call came at 6:15 AM so we would have enough time to get ready and have some breakfast before getting off the ship at 8:00 AM, our scheduled disembarkation time. We are going to take a taxi to the Europcar car rental agency in La Seyne Sur Mer, which is the actual port town we will be docked at, which shares the harbor with Toulon.
We have planned out our route and loaded it up into our GPS, so it should be a fairly easy and straightforward drive. We were a little late getting off of the ship, it took them longer to get the ship tied up and to put all of the security and gangways into place. That is not uncommon, and seems to be the norm these days, we always seem to be a little later than the scheduled arrival time.
When we walked outside, we were surprised that there were not any taxis at the taxi stand area outside the terminal. We were about to go inside the terminal and ask the information desk, but then we saw a taxi drive up. Initially, he was not sure if he could take us since he was supposed to be picking up another passenger. He made a couple of phone calls, and he said he was now available to take us, so we got into the taxi and headed out. It was about a ten minute drive to the car rental agency, and cost Euro 9.00. We went inside and had our car in about ten minutes, after filling out a lot of paperwork. The car was stored in their lot across the street, so we headed over there to inspect it. The only problem was that the car was not being store in this lot. The girl helping us told us to follow her to another storage lot, in the parking lot of a Rugby Stadium. She disappeared behind the gated walls, and was gone for over five minutes. Finally, she came out with the car. We started go go over any damages on the forms, and when she opened the trunk to show us the spare tire, it was missing. We told her we did not want a car without a spare, that would be disastrous if we had a flat tire, and could not change it. In addition, we did not want to have to call and incur charges on the cell phone for that if we ran into an issue with the spare.
She did not have any more of that particular car model, so we walked back to the other storage area and she looked at the cars that were closest to the outside, that we could actually get to without moving a lot of other cars. They were literally packed in like sardines.
We went back to the office and she was going to assign us a car with automatic transmission, but I wanted a manual transmission car since these small cars and small engines really have no power. Finally, she was able to get us a little bit larger car, a Fiat, and it was a stick shift. We plugged in the GPS and were finally on our way.
We had to travel on a portion of the A4, which is the French equivalent to our interstate system, but with tolls about every 10 kilometers. We knew we would be going through two toll booths on our way to Cassis, and that we needed some change. Unfortunately, we only had Euro 4.30 in change, so we were not sure if we had enough for both of the toll stops. When we got to the first toll booth, the signage was not the best. We tried to find an attended booth so we could use bills instead of coins. There are lanes for coins only, electronic toll passes, and then there are a few we thought looked like they had booths for an attendant. We headed for one of those. They were not manned, but they did have several alternative ways to pay the toll. You could use coins, bills and even a credit card. We deposited Euro 2.00 in the coin slot, which was the posted fare for cars The toll gate opened, and off we went.
Our first stop on the way to Cassis was at a medieval walled town called Le Castellet. We exited the A4 and were following the directions the GPS gave us, but we found ourselves on a tiny road heading up into the hills. We went a few blocks and came upon several cyclists heading down hill. Then we met a car going the other way and had to pull over to the side to let the man pass. We were not comfortable going this route, so we turned around in a small driveway and headed back down the hill to the last roundabout and went on another rode that seemed to head in the direction of the town. The GPS picked up the new route, and we also saw road signs for Le Castellet. Once we got to the town, we figured that the GPS had tried to route us on what it figured was a “faster” route, but we are not sure if it would have gotten us there or not.
There were several large parking lots, so we found the one nearest to the outer wall of the town and parked. There was hardly anyone here, so it must be off season. The parking had pay meters, but all of them were covered in black plastic, and not functional, which was great.
We found some stairs that led into the town, and headed that way. It was only about 9:45 AM, so not many of the small stores were open, and hardly anyone was out and about, except for the cats. There were cats everywhere, in the windows, in the bushes and just walking around. They all seemed friendly, so everyone here must have cats.
We took several pictures of the town and buildings, and while we were wandering around, we saw a bus load of fellow shipmates on a guided tour. Obviously, they had arrived by bus, but we were not sure where it had parked.
We did not stay long, mostly because not much was open yet, which we had figured might be the case if we arrived in the morning. However, it was not really an option to come here in the afternoon, it was not on our planned route. However, we now knew where it was, and could come back on a future stop if we wanted.
There was a neighboring town called La Cadiere – D’azur, which we had actually seen when exiting the A4. We decided to skip that town on this trip, and so we got back out onto the A4 and headed to Cassis. We soon arrived at the next tool booth with our Euro 2.40 of remaining change, hoping it was enough to get through the toll. We went to the same type of booth as before, and found the toll listed as Euro 2.30, so we just had enough. We had never seen what the toll amount was when before we got to the toll booths, there had not been any signs listing the amounts, or at least none that we had seen. We took our 0.10 change and were on our way.
We exited the A4 and headed into Cassis. The last time we were here, it was late November 2013, and we had driven right into the downtown area and parked. Today was a different story. There were many more visitors here than in November, and there were some police directing traffic away from the main road into the city center. We followed some signs for parking and found a multi-story parking garage, and pulled in. We only had to walk a few blocks before we arrived at the city center and small harbor. There were quite a lot of people sitting out having coffee at the various restaurants that had tables and chairs set up outside. It was a little more sunny now, and not quite as cool, and much warmer than on our last visit.
The boats for touring the calanques, the small picturesque inlets in the nearby national park that we had hiked to last time, were open for business today. These boats had been shut down for the season on our November visit. We decided to skip the boat tours, they lasted a little longer than we had planned to stay, and did not appear to be leaving very often, probably waiting to get filled with passengers before heading out.
One major accomplishment on this visit was in finding the public toilet. We think this was a different toilet location that was not open that late in the season last time, it was right next to the beach, and had showers and toilets for a fee. It was really nice and clean, so paying a small Euro 0.60 fee to use it was just fine. We had never found the one last time, and it is still a mystery.
We walked around the stores and shops, and were really surprised at the number of visitors that were here. We went into a sandwich shop and Stephanie got a prosciutto and cheese sandwich on her favorite hard bread, and I got a fresh mozzarella and tomato sandwich on my least favorite hard bread. It was the same bread, but I hate baguettes, it hurts my mouth to eat them.
We sat out on a bench at the waterfront and enjoyed our sandwiches and the scenery. Since we had planned out a full day of stops on our scenic drive, we only stayed for about an hour in Cassis. We headed back for the parking garage, and since we had been in the garage for less than an hour, there was no fee to park.
We plugged in our next location into the GPS route, the Parc National Des Calanques, which is a scenic drive along the cliffs of the Mediterranean Sea on the way to the next town, La Ciotat. It was quite a winding roadway, and fairly narrow. There were many scenic lookout access points along the way, and we made several stops for pictures. Once again, we had wished for a little more sun and blue skies to make the photos more colorful, but at least it was not raining, which had been in the forecast. A lot of other people were also taking this roadway, apparently it is a very popular route between the two cities.
After we got to La Ciotat, we headed for an old church that was built on the high bluffs of the Calanque Parc. We once again took some really small and narrow roads through some neighborhoods and finally arrived at the location of the church. There was not really any parking nearby, and it was a short hike to the coast to see the church. We opted to skip that and headed for our next stop, which was the tourism office for La Ciotat. We had picked this as a waypoint mainly so the GPS would route us to the roadways along the coast. We once again got routed through some really tight and narrow roads through housing, we were so glad that we did not pass any other cars heading in the other direction, there was barely enough room for us to get around the tight corners in our little car.
The next several stops along the route were also just waypoints to force the GPS to follow a particular route along the beaches of several small towns. We made a couple of short stops for pictures of the beaches as we followed our route. The next major town we drove through was Bandol. There were long stretches of beachfront along the road, but not many people were out enjoying them at this time of year. It was quite a scenic spot and a pretty town.
From Bandol, we headed to Sanary sur Mer, another small town near the coast. There was not a lot there to see, and traffic was starting to build up, either because this was a little larger town, or that it was now about 2:00 PM and we were seeing some commuter traffic, or a combination of the two.
We were not far from La Seyne sur Mer and the rental car location, so we just headed “home” to drop off the car. The lady in the rental location had said that the afternoon traffic in La Seyne sur Mer could get heavy, so we did not want to get involved in driving through that. We had seen most of what we had planned, and I was a little tired of driving. We must have gone through about a 100 roundabouts today, they are extremely popular here. I felt good, I had only been beeped at once for not following the proper protocol. The GPS was really nice to have for the roundabouts, it told you exactly which roadway to exit on, although sometimes even that was tricky to follow.
We stopped for gas at the station right next to the rental car office, and went to put the diesel fuel into our car. However, I could not figure out which pump to use. There were two grades of two different fuels, two pumps had green handles, one was yellow and one was orange. The yellow and orange nozzles were called Gasol, and we can’t remember the name of the two green ones, but none said anything close to diesel. I sent Stephanie into the rental office to ask the lady agent. She came out and said to use the yellow handle pump, the two green ones were gasoline or “petrol” and the Gasol was the diesel, just two different grades.
We put in Euro 9.75 for fuel, and returned the car to the lot across the street, as directed, where an attendant checked us in. He gave me one of the copies of the forms, and I thought I was done. Stephanie was in the Europcar office, and the lady there had called us a taxi for the return trip to the ship. We saw another person come in and hand over the yellow form I thought was my copy of the return paperwork. I asked and the lady and she told us we need to turn that from in to complete the contract. We had already been in the office for several minutes, and she had said nothing about the form until I asked, which seemed strange since she saw us turn in the car and had helped with the fuel identification at the pump. She entered the the info from the form into a computer and then wanted a receipt for the fuel, we are not quite sure why since the attendant we turned the car into had indicated the car was full on the form. We got our receipt and by this time the taxi was here. It was a strange rental return.
The taxi to the ship was uneventful, the driver could speak reasonable English and asked us a lot of questions as we drove, where we were from, and about the cruise.
Once we got back on the ship, we headed to the room to drop off our back-packs, and get a snack of pizza and a glass of wine. It had been a nice drive, but a little tedious at times due to the the traffic and small roads.
We had a couple of refreshments in the Vines Wine bar, and some of their tapas. I worked to try and catch up on the blog while we relaxed. We had not seen anything great on the dinner menu for the dining room, so we opted to go to the buffet for dinner.
We had a couple of after dinner drinks and then went back to the room to prepare for our stop in Barcelona tomorrow. We are scheduled to dock at 7:00 AM, so we will need to be up at about 5:30 AM to get ready.
