Marseille to Barcelona 8/31

When Kelly and I were planning where to go on our journey several months ago, we settled on Marseille because it was as close to halfway between Paris and Barcelona as we could find. We didn’t have any real intentions in spending a lot of time there, or doing anything really cool. However, it definitely was one of my favorite things that we did on the trip.

We got up early and our host drove us to the metro station. From there we went downtown to the main train station where we rented a locker and stashed our bags. Then we took a metro and a bus (We drove by a Le Corbusier building AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!). We ended up at the outskirts of town at some university. From there we entered an area like a little state park and went hiking up this trail. The trail was hot and dry, the vegetation reminded me of a lot of Philmont. There were a fair amount of people on the trail for a Sunday morning, but it wasn’t too crowded. When we reached the top of the hill we were on we had an excellent view of Les Calanques.

Les Calanques are these giant cliff peninsulas on the Mediterranean Coast. They stretch up the coast for a few miles and there are lots of trails up to the tops and down to the bottoms (haha ‘bottoms’) where there are beaches. We didn’t have a lot of time to spend there so we hiked to the top of the nearest one. We stayed for a short while and relished the beautiful view, then began our descent. The lower we went the bluer the water became. We finally made it to a very small “beach.” This beach is nothing comparable to anything in North Carolina. There was no sand, only small smooth pebbles. The total size of possible space to lie down was about 30 feet by 50 feet, and pretty much all of it was already staked out. This didn’t bother us because it is physically impossible for our skin to get any tanner than it already is, so instead we went swimming. The water was extremely cold and felt very good after hiking in the midday sun.

We swam for about an hour. There was a small steep little rock island that we jumped off of into the water. Kelly wanted to go first. She got out of the water and walked to the edge, looked down, and took the walk of shame back to the water. It took some convincing and reminding her of how she chickened out at Long’s Peak 12 months ago before she finally jumped.

The hike back up to the top was very hot, and our feet rubbed against our wet sandals giving us blisters, but it was well worth the journey. We took the bus back and made it in time for our train to Barcelona. When we arrived in Barcelona we were extremely tired and went straight to the hostel and to sleep.

Marseille turned out to be one of the best days of our trip, and we are very excited to see Barcelona tomorrow.