Cannes and Sanary-sur-Mer

A quick note, if you are read­ing this on our blog and not in an email; if you click e pic­ture they get big and full resolution

The first expo­sure to France was land­ing at Cannes. It was hot, extremely muggy, full of peo­ple prepar­ing for the upcom­ing Cannes film fes­ti­val. Tourists all over the place, and the locals seemed annoyed at them already. In the fist pic­ture you can see the many tents along the harbour-front ready for the red carpet.

We walked around town, Strolling through the old parts of town and through the mar­ket streets tak­ing some pic­tures and hav­ing the locals gen­er­ally con­fused by a keen inter­est in to their cul­ture. (Brian: I saw some baguettes lean­ing up against a door­way and thought it would make a fun pic­ture. As I was tak­ing the shot, a local walked by and mut­tered under her breath, “c’est seule­ment du pain, Mon­sieur” mean­ing “it’s only bread, sir”).

We did our best to hide in the shade, and wan­dered back to the boat in the after­noon to get away from the crazi­ness of the film fes­ti­val set-up.

Brandi sched­uled a full-body mas­sage on the boat and and Brian had a nap. As the boat was prepar­ing to leave the dock, a sud­den cloud burst rolled through the port made for some very inter­est­ing and fun cloud photos.

Sanary-sur-Mer is said to be the sun­ni­est place in France. It is sur­rounded by wooded hills that pro­tect the town, bay and fine sand beaches from the strong mis­tral wind. We signed up for an excur­sion to Aix-en-Provence (Aix pro­nounced Ex) and boarded a bus tour where we were dri­ven to town about an hour away upon arriv­ing we were led on a guided tour of the old town.

With sun-dappled squares, lux­u­ri­ant foun­tains, and Paul Cézanne’s hal­lowed stu­dio, this cap­ti­vat­ing uni­ver­sity town is con­sid­ered the main hub of Provence and the most cul­tural town in the region.

After the tour we had some free time to explore Aix-en-Provenance and we quickly found a cafė for our first expe­ri­ence of the French cafė lifestyle. In a word, amaz­ing! In the back­ground of the pic­ture below, is the old­est con­tin­u­ally oper­at­ing cafė in France.

We returned to Sanary-sur-Mer and wan­dered around the main harbor-front find­ing nat­u­rally grow­ing birds of par­adise flow­ers grow­ing all around. Even­tu­ally we returned to the ship for din­ner and drinks.