It was onto Lyon and, as was becoming our standard in France, into the cheapest Ibis Hotel. May have already typed this earlier, but for the benefit of anyone going to France on a budget in future, we found some Accor Hotel options were often the same price or cheaper than hostel options.Like our incredible thai feed in Edinburgh, we unusually had a great, cheap chinese dinner to start our time in Lyon. The next morning we were up and about at 6am to watch the ...

After a long day of trains and train delays we had crossed back into the south of France, and the popular riviera city of Nice. Despite being autumn the pebble beach was still quite popular for relaxing during the day and young groups of people drinking and socialising at night. Our first day, we took a walk along the beach to admire the sky blue waters before checking out the old town and heading up Castle Hill for a great view of the city that extended along t...

After a very unorganised train ride where we had to stand up for much of it, we arrived at Bordeaux, and as usual, had booked a hotel close to the station which was even better for us as it was incredibly cheap.We soon found out why, we were pretty much on the border of what we imagine is Bordeaux's ghetto.We had to walk through said ghetto to get into the city centre, which made for some uncomfortable situations.The main one of these was, en route to the superma...

La Rochelle was a town we'd heard a lot less about than other French cities, but being apparently popular with holiday makers, we thought we'd check it out.We soon found this to be exactly right, although unlike many of the places we had been and were yet to go, it was flooded with domestic tourists rather than hoards of poms, aussies and americans! Our hotel was set in the towns old St Nicolas church, and was also quite new and spacious much to our surprise.Th...

We went to Nantes, and to sum up fairly briefly just chilled out and didn't do anything much in our few days there, opting to simply relax rather than doing the usual hoards of touristy visits and activities.As mentioned we were put up by Yaelle with her brother Tituan in a great little apartment right in the centre of town.Tituan was on school holidays and working at a supermarket more or less on the same street and even with his limited English, provided us w...