We left the apartment around 8:30 this morning, caught the subway and changed to the local bus #60 for a ride up to Notre Dame. The bus dropped us off right at the foot of the stairs, which was a whole lot closer than the other day when we were on the tour bus. And we had the place to ourselves for about 30 minutes! Even then, it was just a trickle of people, nothing like it would've been the other day. The views from up there were incredible, you can see almost ...

There's a boat you can take here that goes to the National Park of Calanques, which is French for Creeks. We bought some tickets and away we went. The word is a little misleading, because it's more like canyons or rock formations, not creeks. But maybe if we could've understood the narration (in French of course, no English version available--boo!), we would've gotten why they call it creeks. In any case, it was a beautiful day and the seas were calm, and the vie...

We can see the Notre Dame de Garde church from our apartment, and decided to go visit it today. Since we don't have a car, we bought a ticket for the tour bus to get us there. We didn't think about how crowded it would be today, so instead of getting off at the church, we stayed on the bus for one whole circle and ten more stops. We'll just take the city bus to it if we decide to go. It looks like a beautiful building, but it's perched WAY up on a hill, which has...

We met our driver bright and early on another beautiful morning. She introduced herself as Lucy and away we went to Aix. We were supposed to pick up two more people but only one showed up, Sarah. We waited for 30 minutes for the other woman, and finally gave up and left. Our first stop was Baux de Provence. It's a medieval city, very picturesque, only has 22 full time residents. We were given time to wander around where we bought some olive oil, tamponade, and ch...

We visited the Tourism Office near the port early this morning, and signed up to do a bus tour tomorrow of some nearby towns. We also got a lot of information on different activities here in Marseille. We then walked over to our food tour meeting point and proceeded to patiently wait. At 10:00, which was the appointed meeting time with no guide showing up, we knew something was wrong. Rich called the office and found out that we were in the wrong location (throug...