We needed two trips in our little VW Polo to get everyone and their suitcases, plus all of our supplies from the guest house in Puyloubier down to the house in Point Rouge, Marseille, but we managed it just fine. This second house was found using Airbnb, and it is a really lovely spot, with a beautiful enclosed garden, air conditioning (which we almost never used), a nice espresso machine, gas stove, and an outdoor gas barbeque. It is located only about 450 metres from the beach, and is in a safe, quiet, family-type neighbourhood.
Bruce had only one night left in Marseille, and we all got dressed up and went to one of the less expensive but still highly recommended restaurants in the old port area, that served Marseille’s most famous dish: bouillabaisse.
There are lots of fresh fish in the groceries, and I have made bouillabaisse myself before, but we opted to do some research and find a good restaurant, to see how the experts prepared it...
First the waiters showed us the selection of fresh fish that they had chosen for the soup, and then they served us in two courses… the bouillon was served first, very hot; thick slices of bread are rubbed with garlic, then covered with a rouille of olive oil with breadcrumbs, garlic, saffron and cayenne pepper... and then dunked into the soup.
For the second course, the different fish displayed earlier are cooked, deboned, and served next on a separate platter with potatoes and an additional serving of the bouillon.
It was really quite delicious, but very filling. Afterwards we walked off some of those calories by making a little tour around the old port at night, and had a look at the strikingly illuminated exterior of the Museum of Civilisations of Europe and the Mediterranean. Then it was back to Point Rouge.
The next day I took Bruce to the airport, and saw him off for his long flight back to Toronto, via Munich and Boston… then headed back to the house. We hope he had a good time in the south of France with us...
I had done a lot of driving while in Aix, and now during the Marseille time we resumed our urban lifestyle, and so used the car mostly for grocery shopping, with relatively few road trips. One day we rented bikes and cycled around Marseille, visiting a variety of second hand vinyl shops, including O’CD, Lollipop Music, Galete Records, and found a couple of records for our collections... I bought J.J. Cale’s 1976 Troubador record, which turned out to be a fantastic surprise, and Malcolm finally bought an older pressing of the Who’s 1971 Who’s Next that had been on his list for a while. We also hit the big shopping centre, so that Duncan and Malcolm could get the new Harry Potter book in English, and did some other shopping.
We stopped by the beautiful theatre of the Opera de Marseille, and had a nice espresso at the coffee roaster Cafés Debout, just around the corner. It has a nice ambiance with big bags of green and roasted coffee beans scattered around the place, and according to the proprietor it is a favourite haunt of opera singers in need of a little boost before a rehearsal or performance. We bought some of his dark roast espresso coffee to try in the machine at home.
We did a lot of cooking ourselves that week; the gas stove was much appreciated, as was the gas barbeque outside with a flat griddle for pancakes.
We were cautious at first, but after an exploratory pancake was successful, the griddle turned out to work quite well. It also was handy for making homemade naan bread, which we had along with lamb curry, cucumber raita, and a neat little recipe for grilled “little gems” romaine lettuce with green peas, mint and garlic. Yes, grilled lettuce. It was very yummy!
Other days we spent at the beach, or playing a lot of cribbage; Duncan has become quite good at that game. Maggie even did the heroic thing, and engaged the boys in a Monopoly game, a classic “cottage” type activity.
There was a classical guitar there, and Malcolm played it a lot, so much so that he has started to prefer the wider neck over the skinnier electric one.
The beach at Marseille was very clean and lovely, although it could get pretty crowded, depending on where you set up camp. On one of our shopping days we bought a pop-up sun shelter, and this turned out to be useful. Malcolm usually laid claim to the laybag, but while the beaches are pebbled insead of being sandy, the rest of us still managed with just our towels. Every day was sunny, so we all used a lot of sunscreen, and made sure that we were swimming early in the day or later in the afternoon, avoiding the hottest part of the day.
We really enjoyed the remarkable cool and refreshing water… The first few times I swam in the ocean after moving to Europe, I was always a bit confused by its saltiness, having always grown up swimming in sweet Ontario lakes, but now that I’m used to it, I love the clarity, and the clean iodine smell of the ocean. Some days we had very high waves, and very strong winds from offshore, and could watch the kiteboarders doing their stunts. On those days the laybag and the sun shelter would have blown away, and we experimented with rocks and tent pegs to anchor them, with varying degrees of success.
One of the main attractions to this part of France was the limestone mountains that lie to the south of Marseille. I was a bit upset when I looked on the public website for information on trail routes early in the week and found that access to them was restricted!
Apparently during the summer months, logging crews are working up in the mountains, and there is also a great risk of fire due to the dry conditions and high temperatures, so not every area is open to hikers. Instead I decided to try to get some running in the city, and managed some nice jogs in the nearby Parc Borély, getting up to around 10km without any pain, which was really great after my nagging tendonitis problems of the previous month. However there was no elevation to speak of, so the next time I decided to run from the house up to Notre Dame de la Garde, the basilica built on the highest point of the city, at about 150m elevation, and about 6km away.
The basilica was beautiful indeed, with many paintings of ships hanging side by side along the walls of the church. These turned out to be “ex-votos”, or offerings to the Virgin Mary, and were given by sailors or their families to give thanks for being saved from shipwreck or pirates.
Notre Dame de la Garde has many beautiful mosaics that have been recently restored, using tiles from the same Venetian manufacturer that supplied the original construction.
As lovely as the basilica was, however, I was more affected by the Abbey of St. Victor, which I encountered as I continued my run down the hill to the old port. The abbey has been there since Roman times, but the current church was rebuilt in the year 1200, and it has a very different atmosphere; I found it quite moving and magical inside.
I also planned next to visit the imposing Fort Saint-Nicolas; built by King Louis XIV between 1660 and 1664, supposedly to defend the city’s port, it also served to quell the uprising of the people of the city against their governor. Its guns are pointed at the city, not away from it! But it is closed for renovations and I couldn’t get inside, and so I continued to run home along the waterfront, and ended up doing about 15km that morning.
I kept checking the trails website, and found out that depending on the rainfall and temperature and wind estimates, sometimes the trails were in fact open, and that some paths are open all the time. So we tried some hiking together to the Calanque de Sormiou, which is one of the closest little bays to the south. It was a hike of around 3.5km with a descent of 158m, and we all managed it without too much trouble. The beach there was super crowded though, and we were pretty disappointed, and so made our way back to the car.
We consoled ourselves by driving to Cassis and swimming at the much nicer (but also very crowded) beach there, and then had a drink on a café terrace before driving home.
As the weather had moderated somewhat I got up early on Friday and ran the trail that climbed to the Croix de Marseilleveyre, one of the higher points of the mountain range visible from our house. This was really quite the adventure; first run about three km or so on the road to the access point at Saména, and from there I hoped to follow the trail that led up onto the mountain. A strong wind had been blowing since the evening before, and a sailboat had washed up on the rocks as I passed along the beach boardwalk...
Even at 8am when I started it was already quite gusty. This continued as I made my way up to the cross at the top, a trip which took almost exactly one hour. I was rewarded with quite a view!
The French are quite big on what they call the Grande Randonnée… this is a network of long-distance footpaths that criscross France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Spain. There are 60,000 km in France alone, and they are marked with a characteristic white and red stripe. In the photo below you can see a vertical marking at the bottom indicating that one should to continue in a straight line, and then a right angle at the top of the photo indicating a left turn.
Apart from the GR trails there are other trails and circuits marked out with different colours... navigating using the little printed map book that I borrowed from the owner of the house was fairly straightforward, but one must be careful as trails of differing levels of difficulty do cross one another at times and it's easy to get off the track. The French must be in pretty great shape, if this is a popular leisure activity, because trails that are marked as relatively easy can still get quite challenging. I ran into a number of places where I had to really look out for the trail markings, and some places where the path led me down narrow crevasses that were more like mountain climbing than trail hiking! The Pas de Pins I'm pointing at in the photo below was particularly narrow and vertical but I made it just fine.
But the main concern for me was wind. In the lee of the mountain then it was okay, but there were times when I turned a corner into an open section and the wind was like a big hand pushing me backwards. It never felt really dangerous at any time but if the wind had been much stronger I might have started to worry a little bit.
I am glad that it was still early morning so the wind was not at its height, and that I had lots of water, a good hat and sunscreen. The warm morning light on the weathered rocky terrain was gorgeous though, and I saw almost no one until near the very end of my return trip, so I was happy for the solitary time.
The run back down took much longer; I notice that I am a lot slower in descending hills than climbing them. But I was back home by 10:30 or so and happily enjoying a beer.
The rest of that day was spent relaxing at the beach, packing up the house, cleaning and getting ready to depart the next day, return the car to Aix-en Provence and take the train back home to Brussels. It unfolded in a fairly straightforward fashion, and as our checkout of Marseille on Saturday was fairly early, but the car wasn’t due back until 14h30, we used that extra couple of hours to visit the Musée Granet, a lovely museum that was running a temporary exhibition of french impressionist painters, including Matisse, Cézanne, and others, alongside its permanent collections of sculpture, archaeological displays and 18th-and 19th-century french paintings.
It’s really a beautiful spot, and it would have been nice to spend longer looking at the permanent collections, and to have made a visit to the second building, the Site Granet XXe., but that will have to wait until another visit…
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