Bonjour!

Monday, July 5th, 2010

This morning’s train is the first train that we have had to reserve in advance. Many of the trains in France and Spain require reservations, whereas thus far we have simply boarded the train and found any available seat and have had to pay no additional fees. The reservation fees for most trains as a pass holder are pretty nominal, with the exception of overnight trains, which we had planned to take from Madrid to Lisbon and back and from Madrid to Paris, however after looking into airfares, it will actually be cheaper for us to fly to Paris from Madrid, and we are just going to give Lisbon a pass. Our reservation this morning was on the 8:17 a.m. train out of Geneva, so we got up and had breakfast at the hotel (which was included, as it was a Holiday Inn Express, a rarity in Europe) at 6:30 and headed out shortly thereafter by the hotel shuttle to the Geneva Airport train station where we connected to the main station and boarded our train. We arrived in Marseille, France around noon and boarded our connecting train to Cannes, which departed Marseille at around quarter past noon. This train ride was very scenic, traveling along the “Côte de Azur” with it beautiful beaches and sailboats and yachts out at sea. We arrived in Cannes around 2:30 in the afternoon, and decided to take a taxi to the hotel, as we did not have clear instructions as to how to get to the hotel via public transportation and could not location an information office (this ended up costing us approximately 10 Euros).

After dropping our bags at the hotel we got public transportation information and a map from the front desk at the hotel, yet another Holiday Inn, and boarded the bus to the center. We arrived at the beach around 4:00 and it had cooled of considerably, but we still enjoyed a swim in the Mediterranean and some relaxation. After a couple of hours at the beach we went back to the hotel to clean up before dinner.

It was nearly 8:00 before we made it back to the center of town. We located a restaurant near the port and had a nice meal (something the costs in Switzerland had not allowed). I actually had a salad (another thing I hadn’t had in a while) which was quite an unusual combination of ingredients (including potatoes, yogurt, corn, bacon, brie, egg, tomatoes, etc.) but delicious. I again partook in the incredibly cheap but excellent wine offering, a 50cl carafe of wine for only 6 Euros. After dinner we walked through the harbor and looked at all the incredible yachts, and imagined what life must be like for their owners (luckily we weren’t the only dreamers doing so) before heading to an ice cream parlor we had spotted earlier to grab a couple of ice cream cones. With ice cream in hand we made our way back along the harbor to the bus station and then back to our hotel.