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James and Ernie by a vineyard.
Outside a vineyard. They are very tiny vines only a few feet off the ground. Beaune - Lyon, Lyon - Avignon - Marseille - La Ciotat
After some discussion in the morning we decided to go into the town of Beaune to find some wineries instead of going into the big city of Dijon. Lee guided us into Beaune which we discovered the small city centre to be an old medieval city which was surrounded by stone walls. We parked big Ernie on the outside and headed on foot into the walls of the city. Very interesting and different…a place I’ve never experience before. We came across an old church, which James seemed to be fascinated by the old key holes. He started taking pictures of them, and of course we had to seek out more interesting ones.
We wandered around for a good while, and kept seeing adverts for caves….well I thought they were like cave you explore. It turns out these cave are the big wine cellars for many different wineries. It was about 12euros to go into a cave and sample about 10-20 different wines. Then if you like the wines you can either buy them there or venture out to the wineries themselves. It’s a very different system than
Beaune
A cathedral in a medieval town centre at home, the wineries themselves are not for tours and going for a visit, only if you wish to purchase wine.
We opted out of the wine tour for now, just because we wanted to get to Lyon, and James still needed to drive. So we found a wine shop, ended up tasting a couple of different wines, bought a couple of bottles and were on our way. This made me happy enough to get some local wines to try. I was on the search for the great wine we had the previous night at dinner, but no luck.
Again we were back on the road for another few hours to Lyon. We stayed at a big campground just outside the city in Port de Lyon just for the night.
The next day we had a slow start. We went for a little run and James played with Ernie’s battery. We have had challenges with the leisure battery that the lights are connected to. He still couldn’t get it to charge, but we were trying new things to it everyday to get it to work. We drove to Avignon, which took a good 3 hours or so because
James in Avignon
We were on top of the Palais de Popes we decided to take the Toll highway instead of the scenic route which would have taken about 6 hours. It cost 25euros to drive from Lyon to Avignon in half the time, so we thought that was an ok deal. We arrived in Avignon to find another walled in city with a huge palace called the Palais des Papes. The Pope lived here in 1309! Pretty cobblestone streets, with huge stone walls! We played the tourist, walking around taking pics and eating gelato! Yummy! We spent a couple of hours walking around then we were back on the road to go to Marseille and finally get to the beach.
We arrive in Marseille, and our first thought was not what we expected…it looked really shabby like. Maybe it was just where we were driving through. We didn’t have a place to stay yet, so we tried to find an internet signal to try and find one. With no luck James asked at a petrol station to find out that there were no campsites in Marseille. But there were lots in a seaside village just east. So back in Ernie we went, through some crazy tiny mountain windy roads to
find ourselves in La Ciotat. We had finally reached the Mediterranean Sea! We drove through the town with a couple of campsites to choose from. After a little campsite finding adventure and stopping at a roadside pizza maker for dinner, (it was a little trailer converted with a forno pizza oven, literally on the side of the road! Awesome pizza though!), we eventually found a campsite that wasn’t full. Parked Ernie and onto explore the grounds. It ended up being right on the water, but no real beach. Nice place, but no toilet seats and you have to bring your own toilet paper. This may seem funny, but essential things and we don’t really think about it at home. I don’t think James had ever seen the stand and squat toilets before either…quite a good laugh!
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