Blogs from France, Europe - page 1586

Our contiki tour started on Friday 8 July in London. We were planning to stay the night at the hotel that the tour started from but given the events in London we were not able to get to our hotel. So we stayed at a friends place, which meant an early start, we tried booking a cab but could not so at 5am we were walking up the road trying to hail a cab. The cabbie could not take us all the way to the hotel because the area was still all blocked, so we walked in. At every street corner we were met by police who questioned where we were going. By the time we got there we had passed about 20 cops. Then at the hotel there were at least another 20 out the ... read more

Today was truly a travel day. The bus ride from Nice to Barcelona was scheduled for 10 hours, and that's under the best of conditions. We didn't encounter the best of conditions. We did get to see a furniture truck reduced to a pile of ash - literally. Apparently, wooden furniture and diesel fuel burn pretty well together.... That kept the highway a nice parking lot for close to 2 hours. The stopover before that in Avignon was nice, but short. I was surprised to see that Avignon's walls are almost completely intact. I was also surprised to see the size of the pope's palace. I knew it was opulent, but I didn't realize it took up half the town centre! The official story if I remember is that the two resident popes were recalled because ... read more

The original plan was to spend a day in Aix-en-Provence. That pretty much went down the drain last night when I went on S.N.C.F's (French train company) website. A return trip from Nice to Aix would have run me almost 60 euros. I really shouldn't have been surprised; I knew train travel in France wasn't cheap, and that the Côte d'Azur regional trains are merely exceptions to this rule. Hence, having no three hour (per direction) train trip to look forward to, I let myself sleep in today. I needed it, as one of my dormmates almost matched the record I observed set in my London hostel for the most inhumanly loud snoring ever. Anyways, with some time on my hands, and no real desire to wander through the shopping paradise that is Nice, I got ... read more

It was easy to travel to the entrance of Mont St-Michel from Gare Pontorson Mont St-Michel. The regional SNCF train arrived on time from Dol-Bretagne and the autocar (bus) was waiting only 250m from the station building. Couriers Bretton bus is only 1.40euros each way to base of Mont St-Michel and runs about 8 times during summer. If you have a backpack you can leave this at Mont St-Michel for the day. Just go through the main entrance then up the second flight of stairs on the left where the toilets are. The toilet attendant will secure your back pack/luggage for 2.00euros for the whole day. There are no luggage lockers at Gare Pontorson Mont St-Michel. Warning you can make the trip from Caen or Bayeux in one day by train, but I would not recommend ... read more

Inicio esta experiencia de desarrollar un diario en linea para compartir ...sobre las experiencias que tendremos en nuestro proximo viaje a Barcelona y Francia. La primera parada, en Cataluña, para visitar a Mauricio en su ciudad temporal mientras termina sus estudios de diseño y posteriormente viajar por el sur de Francia (Burdeos, Provence, Cote d'Azur) para terminar en Paris. Sera tambien la primera vez que empecemos a utilizar el plan de vacaciones de Marriott, especialmente para aprovechar la estadia en dos hoteles 5 estrellas de su cadena...el Ritz de Barcelona y el JW Marriott de los Campos Eliseos...... Cada vez que generemos una entrada a este diario (BLOG, como se conoce en Internet y uno de los elementos mas de moda de esta red) ustedes recibiran un mail generado automaticamente para que lo puedan leer y ... read more