Wed, 4/16/25    Marseille

Day 101 - Wednesday, April 16th, 2025 – Marseille, France

Another day, another excursion. We woke up to a gray and rainy day. The TV said 57°. I don't mind so much going on the excursions every day. I just don't like the rainy gray days. I really need the sunshine and the heat. I guess that's why we moved to Florida. We made our way down to seven for breakfast. It was not too cold, but it wasn't warm either. We quickly wolfed our breakfast and headed outside. We were quickly met with our tour guide, Nadia, and driver, Rebo. Right off the bat they were planning on an 8 hour tour but somewhere down the road Princess changed our length of stay to 6 hours. We had to be back on the boat by no later than 4:30. I don't know that that changed much, but in hindsight it might have been a good thing.

We drove around Marseille. We saw their version of Lakeshore Drive. It was pretty impressive. Instead of going around the shore of Lake Michigan this went around the shore of the Atlantic. We saw the city walls that protected the city through history. Marseille is the second biggest city in France. It is at the same time one of its oldest. We drove by a huge Catholic Church in the center of town it's called Cathedral of La Major.  There are two sites. They are called the same thing. The older church was originally built BCE. The new church is contemporary and was started in 1850 and finished somewhere near 1900. We did not get out of the car. Mary took pictures from the window.

We then drove up to Notre Dame de la Garde. Before we went into the actual church, we took pictures of the city below. I can only guess that we were only up about 1500 to 2000 feet. As we entered the church, I got the sense that we had been there before. As we worked around the room, I knew that we had been there before. Strung from the ceiling on a piece of rope were two or three small wooden boats. I remember these boats. Later, Mary looked it up in the pictures and find out that we were there in 2019 in our Mediterranean side of our 30 day Mediterranean Baltic cruise. We took more pictures, loaded into the car and headed to Provence.  Along the way, the driver stopped outside of a huge marketplace. I sat in the car. Mary and Nadia went into the marketplace and we were there for a good 45 minutes. Mary was able to get everything except stamps. She even got me too Monster Energies from France. She also bought more potato chips, and she found pretzels.

It was raining pretty good by the time we got to Provence. The thinking was we were going to stroll along the street and grab lunch. Well, we did not stroll very far. We picked the second restaurant we found. It was a higher end place. Had it not been raining, we probably would not have stopped there but that's neither here nor there at this point. We went in and tried to decipher the menu. Nadia did not stay with us. Through some trial and error, we were able to order a glass of wine, a Diet Coke, Fried calamari, a fish dish and a chicken dish. The red wine was a local one. Lacosta something. Mary liked her chicken dish. I did not know it at the time, but my fish dish was an entire fish. It came to the table with head and tail. Thankfully, the waitress took care of all that for us. She did a good job of deboning it. It was accompanied by a side salad. We both ordered French fries. They were pretty good. It was pricey, but it was good. By now it was getting late. You could tell from the driver that he was concerned about the time getting back. He kept looking at his watch and his phone. We said we wanted to be back by 4:00 at the latest. There was some discussion between Nadia and the driver which made me think that he may have made a wrong turn and she corrected him. It didn't look like he liked being corrected. I could be way off base because I didn't understand a word they were saying but I could tell from their body language. Nonetheless, we pulled up to the ship at 4:10. That was probably as close as we've been to ship leaving time. I was not concerned because there were probably 200 people that were in line behind us to get through security. I don't know exactly what time we left tonight. I don't think we left on time though.

You made it back up to the room. We were both tired, cold and wet. We're both looking to nap for an hour or so. We agreed that we would not go to dinner because we had the big lunch. As I write this, Mary is down at 9:00 doing her jewelry store giveaway thing.

We had been to Marseille before. The weather was a big factor. Nadia did her best. The driver could have been better. He just drove. Obviously, that's his job but it would have been nice for him to stop every so often so we could take pictures. On the way back to the ship there were a couple of bumping spots that I damn near bumped out of my chair. There was one point earlier on where I wanted to remove my coat. He barely stopped the car long enough for me to do that. He just was not accommodating. That's a good word.

Tomorrow is Barcelona. The weather is supposed to be better. Here's hoping for little things.