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France, Italy and Switzerland, August 2002
Day
9 Your mom had a serious case of the 'sleeps' after our big day kayaking and we were in bed until noon on Saturday, the 24th of August. Eventually we ended up walking up the hill behind the château that overlooks all of Cassis. We saw a vineyard we especially liked; it had views of Cassis and the sea in addition to the vineyard and wonderful house. At one point we shared a fig from a tree and despite your mothers objections, I sampled a raw green olive, baaaah! A bit later we took the bus for 1.20 euros each up to the train station to try to arrange the next leg of our trip. The bus had an incredible turning radius; I was sure we were going to hit walls and other cars at every bend in the road. While Emily was in the train station I was busy outside out side arranging a ride home. Actually, a couple of older French women saw me standing there and offered me a ride. It took some gesturing before I realized what they meant but a few minutes later we were in the back of a Fiat Panda heading back down to Cassis.
We
had our cheapest dinner so far consisting of: tomato with mozzarella
salad, pesto mussels with fries but without sand and seafood pizza with
hot oil. Of course we started out with the drink of Cassis, pastis.
While dining, the group watching European football across the street
would occasionally roar and our old friends, the accordion player and
his striking daughter played 'Oh Suzanna'. Day
10 And
on Sunday he rested, or maybe that was the 7th day, or maybe...
Well, that is just a fabrication but on Sunday, the 25th of August, we
got up at 9:30 am and did laundry and to our dismay spent 10 euros on
one load. And the items were not even completely dry. Being
the silly person that I am, I bought a large synthetic laundry/grocery
bag for 2 euros. Maybe your mom can tell you why simple little
things like bags make me so excited. We also cleaned the studio
and went to an artisan fair were I bought a wallet and Emily bought a
corkscrew, a 'Merle' birdcall, assorted cookies and leather bracelets.
For lunch we bought a roast chicken and ate most of it, using a fresh
baguette to sop up most of the sauce. And their was a lot of sauce
to mop up, after putting the chicken in a bag, the friendly lady at the
store put at least five large ladles of the wonderful juice in the bag.
Yum! At
some point in the day we went swimming, and once again later in the day
when it began to rain. Now when I say rain I should really say
DOWNPOUR. I don't know if I have ever experienced harder rain, but
it was warm, so we put on our swim gear and paraded around town, taking
the long way towards the beach. Of course we were the only people
outside, it was great fun to watch everyone watching us from windows and
doorways. It was still raining quite hard after swimming and while we were walking to dinner. As this was going to be our last night we decided to go back to our favorite restaurant, Chez Gilbert. While crossing the street we almost lost our footing as the water was about six inches deep and flowing very rapidly. We made it to Chez Gilbert without getting to wet and had a fine dinner on the second floor, with a window overlooking the storm that cleared while we ate. Although we did not have a playful waiter again, we did drink a whole bottle of wine.
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