Up, up, up and down, down, down!

Thursday 31st May

It's still raining so rather than sight-see in the rain we headed off to find a laundromat. With only a vague address this was a challenge but finally found it - next challenge, a parking spot. We found a proper one - didn't need to be inventive.

The sun came out as we finished the washing so we headed into the city. Lunch was first on the agenda by now and we stopped at a lovely restaurant at the old port with a view to the basilica on the hill.  Rob got his wish to have bouillabaise in Marseille. Rob loves his fish so was looking forward to trying bouillabaise.  He said it was very nice but not something he needed to rush off and repeat. We had a lovely waiter who spoke English and he told Rob how you are meant to eat the bouillabaise - it was hard to tackle until he knew how. I just had the mussels - they weren't as nice as the ones we bought in Rochefort and I discovered the problem with mussels as a meal is that they are cold before you get halfway through. Maybe I'm not really converted.

After lunch we visited the Basilica Notre Dame de la Garde. Such a long steep walk up hill, lots of steps that I stopped counting, but the inside of the church was every bit as stunning as the outside led you to hope for. And the views over Marseille were just amazing.

On the bus on the way to the basilica.
You possibly cant see all the broken wing mirrors on the cars. 

View up from the base of the stairs. 

These were the stairs that weren't covered by the lift. 😟

Some of the beautiful decorations inside. This was built in the late 1800s.

A lot of boats hanging in the church.
Apparently the church watched over the fishermen.

View from the church back over Marseille.

The soccer stadium - very important tourist attraction.

Leaving the church we found the lift which cut out lots of the steps, but there were still 100+ and a steep hill to go down to get back to the bus. Our luck was not running good today - we just missed the bus and it was half an hour wait to the next one, or catch the town bus. We thought we'd flagged the bus down as he came to the stop - we just had to cross the road - but he sailed right on by. Ok! Wait or walk? We opted to walk - all downhill and lots of steps but we did get back before the next bus.

We checked out a large plaza area full of restaurants and picked our lunch venue for tomorrow, and after that it was back to the hotel. Last day tomorrow and we have a cruise planned. It is supposed to be a beautiful day so it will be nice to relax on the water.

We commented yesterday how few tourists there appeared to be. We expected to see a lot of tour groups with their flag toting guide, but I don't think we saw any. However today was a different story. There was obviously a Viking tour ship in town as we saw a lot of buses with Viking signs in them, and heard a lot of american accents around town, and from the basilica we could see 2 cruise ships in port.