Auto World and the journey home

We visited Auto World today and saw some great cars, motorbikes and motoring history.  There wasn't time for much else other than getting back to the railway station to get the train home.  A fun weekend!

Exploring Brussels - Church, Parade, Food, Beer

We had a very full day today starting with an Assembly at Fishmarket followed by the Schuman museum and the European Commission.

Then we saw a Beer Parade and went to a fun place called El Greco for lunch.  After lunch we visited the Horta Museum and then spent some time at the Beer Festival in the main square in Brussels.



We had a drink at "La Morte Subite" then enjoyed a rather good but rather expensive dinner at Scheltema.

A trip to Brussels for a beer festival

We left home around 7.30am this morning to get a train to London to get the Eurostar to Brussels.  We were off on a trip to a "Beligan Beer Weekend" with Gordon's staff social group, HASSRA.

We arrived in Brussels around 2pm and got a coach to our Hotel, the Sheraton on Place Charles Rogier.

After a short rest we went and explored the Comic Strip Museum and then found a bar for a quick drink.

Next we went and found the beer festival and had to buy some tokens for beer as well as for glasses. This was quite a queue but we then got to enter the enclosure on the Grand Place and sampled a few nice Belgian beers.  The portions were small as the alcohol content is high!

We had a pleasant dinner at a restaurant right on the Grand Place called L'Estaminet du Kelderke.

Travelling home

Sadly today meant time to return home.

We got a TGV from Marseilles to Paris at 1006 hrs, getting in to Paris Gare de Lyon at 1323.  The journey was uneventful but Gare de Lyon is a really smelly and badly signposted station, as we found was Gare du Nord after a short Regional Train trip to transfer between the two termini.

The Eurostar was on time and staff served a pleasant light meal to us on the way to London.  We got a train to Oxford quite easily and were home by 7pm after a fabulous holiday.

Chateau d'If and Frioul

Today was the last full day of our holiday. We had a fairly early start and got a boat from the old port to the Chateau d’If, only about a 20 minute trip.   It’s a castle on a rock just off the Marseilles coast that has a fascinating history and offers some great views of the City and of the Frioul islands. There was a useful audioguide for the castle that also synchronised with some of the films showing about the castle.

Once we’d fully explored the castle we got another boat to Frioul.  This is an archipelago consisting of two main islands, Rattoneau and Pomegues (it also includes If and Tiboulain). We did a lot of walking around beautiful paths and saw some good views of the area. There was a fantastic display of aeroplanes too, which were apparently practising for a show on Saturday. They are the Patrouille de France, similar to the UK’s red arrows.

We got a boat back to the mainland around 5.30pm and enjoyed a quick drink before choosing our final evening’s dining venue.  On the advice of TripAdvisor we settled on going to a place called La Table a Deniz.  We enjoyed some really excellent food with me having a veal stew and Gordon enjoying rabbit stuffed with tapenade.

We had a few drinks at our favourite bar. Polikarpov, afterwards to mark the end of the holiday.

Returning to Marseilles and a slightly bonkers dinner

Today we got up fairly early and packed everything up after breakfast so we could drive back to Marseilles.  We left around 11.30am and got to Marseilles in time to return the hire car on time.

Once we’d done that we had a pleasant cous-cous lunch in a Tunisian restaurant near the main rail station then walked down to the Old Port again to check into our fourth and final hotel, the Alizé.  It was right on the port so very convenient, although there were a lot of steps up to the first floor where the lift started – not ideal with huge bags!

Once we’d got settled into our room we went to have a look at the Museum of the History of Marseilles.  Unfortunately it was only opening for another 45 minutes and the person on the reception desk didn’t think that would give us time to do it justice.  We had a bit more of an explore instead and then went back to the Hotel for a rest. We also booked some tickets for another boat trip to see the Chateau d’If and the Frioul islands.

Dinner was at a restaurant called “Chez nous” on Place Notre Dame du Mont.  The food was good but the service just a little bonkers! They insisted we used the badly translated English menu even though we were coping just fine with the French one.

Olive mill in VilleVieille, Plage de L'Espiguette and a night market in Sommieres.

Today was Gordon’s birthday.  We started it with a trip to a local olive cooperative in Villevielle where we were shown all the steps of the process for making oil from raw olives brought in by local people, some of whom only had a handful of trees.  It was interesting also to see the different methods of harvesting olives that are in practice, from picking by hand to fully automated tree-shaking and olive-catching.

After this visit we drove down to Plage de l’Espiguette – it is a huge beach and really well kept.  The sand was clean (and hot) and we had a few hours there including several cooling swims in the sea.

As today was our last full day in Sommieres we decided to have dinner at Chez Tybere, a restaurant recommended by the hotel.  It didn’t disappoint us and we enjoyed seeing a friendly cat there too.