Foreign Perspectives

We’re hoping to keep our programme of mini-holidays running well into the Winter though obviously we’ll need to be more selective about destinations as the Winter kicks in.

At the moment, we still have Albi and Valencia on our short-list. They’re both within a about three hours drive of here which is a perfect daytrip distance. Uzes also looks interesting and there’s still quite a lot in the Nimes/Avignon/Arles area to be seen including the Camarge, Aigues Mortes (“Dead Eagle” but still a lovely place).

Marseilles isn’t much beyond Arles and indeed we managed to get ourselves onto the road to Marseilles last night by mistake. Is it worth going to though? For one thing, I just can’t understand a Marseilles accent but then we don’t talk to many people whilst we’re on our daytrips so that’s no great problem. It’s also got something of a reputation of being a bad area (yes, the whole city!) which puts me off it somewhat but against that I’ve also heard good things about it too.

Monaco at around five hours is a possibility for a weekend type daytrip though it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get a slot for that. In practice though, there isn’t a whole lot in Monaco.

Also sitting at the five hour mark are the likes of Cannes and St Tropez which would be interesting though I’ve not looked into them much as yet. It was quite interesting for me to be in Cannes a few years ago as apparently I’m the image of Jean Marc, one of the French film stars who had been there for the awards a few weeks earlier. I hadn’t realised that at the time so it was pretty confusing for me when a series of girls tried to pick me up in the street though things went downhill somewhat when an old guy tried to do the same thing!