Aix en Provence to Genoa a Horrible Travel Day

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We started the day by checking the email – a bad move as there was an email from the bus company with a summary of our booking with the original point of departure in it. We had an early breakfast and went to the bus station as this was near the old departure point and also buses ran from there to the new departure point. We checked out the old departure point but it did not look very promising so fortunately we went back to the bus station and asked a nice young man at the information desk for help (in French). He went off with our tickets and came back to assure us that the new departure point was correct. We soon got a bus to it although it was Saturday morning and reached the Parc Relais Krypton in good time. We were pleased to see a bus for the same bus company there, and the driver told us that our bus was next. This was all quite a relief, even more so when the bus turned up and the driver knew about our booking.





The bus was quite comfortable and we rolled steadily along the autoroute towards Nice. When we were a few kilometres out we encountered a huge traffic jam, and a distance that normally takes half an hour took about four hours so we missed our train connection. We never really found out what the problem was but the Frenchman next to us thought there had been an accident and they had closed one of the lanes. There must have been hundreds of cars and trucks crawling towards Nice. There were some very unhappy people on the bus.





We had discovered that this bus went right through to Genoa so our first plan was to see if we could stay on it. Fortunately there was enough room and we had just enough cash to pay the fare as the driver would only take cash. Plan B would have been to get another train. There is a big autoroute above the old Corniche which runs along the French riviera coast so we went along this until the first truck stop where the driver was able to take an obligatory break, and so could we, as one could buy food and drink and sit outside under trees, so it was not so bad.





We got the occasional good view from the road but it had a lot of tunnels. Southern France and northwest Italy looked pretty similar. Eventually we reached Genoa at about 7 o’clock and then had the challenge of finding the hotel as we were expecting to go to it from the train station. When asked some young people who looked it up on their phone but they did not give us quite the right directions so we had to ask at a little hotel. Fortunately the woman there knew where the street was but could only explain it in Italian, however off we went and this time it was correct and we soon got to the hotel where they had been wondering what had happened to us.





It was too late to look round Genoa so we went to a local trattoria which was full of locals and sounded like a full on party. Tamara had a very nice rice risotto which came reasonably soon but Dave made the mistake of ordering a secundo piatto which took ages to come and was small and not very good when it did. The wine was good though. It was an extraordinary experience however with waiters rushing round furiously, and a lot of shouting. A blind customer came in and the staff took a lot of trouble to look after him although they were so busy. If we knew then what we know now it would have been a better experience for Dave, but if you go to Genoa we would recommend it. We had quite a good night’s sleep after a stressful day, I think the wine helped.

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