We got up earlier today so that we could go hike the calanques early in the day. But we needed sunscreen and a snack for the hike, so we had to go into town first; we picked up some cheese at the Casino market, bread at the nearest boulangerie, and sunscreen at a convenient pharmacy…and then we had to walk 30 minutes or so to the trailhead at Port Miou. So we were really ready at 11am.

A school group had arrived just before we did and they took off up a steep slope. We followed them for a few minutes until we ran into two hikers coming down the slope. I asked them if we were going the right way to reach Port Pin, the next calanque; they said that it would be much easier if we turned around and followed the main route, which was clearly marked with green and red markings. We followed their advice.

We’d walked the first few hundred meters yesterday, when everything was quiet. Today, we heard loud cheering coming from the other side of Port Miou – there were huge crowds on the overlook watching (and cheering for) the competitors in a kayak race ending at the boat basin.

We walked to the end of Port Mieu – so far, so good!

There were two routes leading to Port Pin; we took the one with the most walkers. It took us up some very slippery rocks; we managed to stay vertical, but it wasn’t easy. When we got to the top of a climb, we could see the beginning of the Port Pin calanque…and we looked at the path we’d have to follow and all the slippery rocks making up the path and decided to turn back.

The first person we saw when we turned around was wearing a very interesting t-shirt (well, it was interesting if you worked for IBM 35 years ago).

We got back to the junction and tried the other route; the footing was much better, but it was windy and we were tired, so we turned around once again and walked back to our AirBnB, enjoying the sights along the way.

We had our bread and cheese (and the last of a bottle of local white wine) in our AirBnb; it was delicious.

After resting for a bit, we set out for town again, and happened to notice an alley across the street connecting our street with one farther down the hill. We decided to follow it.

At the bottom of the alley, we could see the water, and a big slab of flat rock that looked ideal for sunbathing.

A moment later, we saw someone coming out of the water, and we realized that we’d found the naturist beach we’d seen from the boat on our calanque tour yesterday. We continued our walk to town, where we each bought a bathing suit for use at other beaches, such as La Grande Mer.

We’d made dinner reservations on TheFork to go to Le Naio, but when we got there, they were locked up tight!

We waited for a few minutes, then gave up and walked down the waterfront in search of dinner. We’d reached La Vielle Auberge and were looking at their menu when we heard someone calling us – it was Kevin and Kerry from our Rhône cruise, and their daughter who currently lives in Paris. They invited us to join them and we had a very pleasant evening.

We’re not going to try to walk the calanques tomorrow. Maybe we’ll try our new bathing suits. Or maybe we’ll do without. Vive la France!

We had no fixed agenda for today and I’d been up past midnight dealing with my home Internet problems, so we slept in until the sun woke us. We had a leisurely breakfast, did more laundry, edited a few photos, and finally left the AirBnB around 11:30am.

The walk into town is about 15-20 minutes; it takes longer if you stop and look at the beautiful scenery, which we did. Plage du Bestoutan is the closest beach to our AirBnB, and it seems to be very popular, even on a normal work day.

We reached town in plenty of time to visit the market and then had a very nice sea bass lunch at Brasserie Le Cendrillon just off the beach, followed by very good gelato from L’Artisan Glacier while we waited for the Tourist Office to reopen.

But on our way to the Tourist Office, we happened to see the ticket booth for boat tours to the calanques; a one-hour tour to the first three calanques was leaving in just a few minutes, so we bought our tickets and hopped aboard.

After we passed Plage du Bestotan, we were in uncharted territory; the Captain narrated the trip, but in French, so we didn’t really know where we were much of the time.

We reached Calanque de Port-Miou about 15 minutes into the trip.

We sailed around Pointe de la Cacau on the way to the second calanque, Calanque de Port Pin.

Calanque d’en Vau was our final calanque for the trip; it had a big crowd on the beach, rocks, and in the water. It even had cliff divers!

We returned to the harbor and wandered around for a few minutes, then we went back to our AirBnB to rest and cool off.

We didn’t stay long, though; we wanted to see Port-Miou again, and its entrance is only a 15 minute walk from the AirBnb. We could see the harbor from the road into the park.

We were among the very few people going into the park at 6pm – there was a big crowd leaving. We walked around for a few minutes and decided to come back when we’d have more time (and energy) to explore.

We were ready for dinner and had leftover pizza from yesterday and an oven. But the manual for the oven was only in French and Italian, the display on the oven was in French, and there wasn’t anything obvious like a “heat” button. It took a couple of tries, but I found the manual for the UK version of the oven, which let me navigate the oven’s menu system and reheat the pizza…which was much better yesterday. Just as we were closing the oven door after taking out the last of the pizza, the power went out in the kitchen! I called our host who told me that they were having problems with the breaker for the oven and couldn’t figure out what was doing it; he told me where the breaker was and I reset it. Then I tried opening and closing the oven door again…and the lights went out again. I reset the breaker again so we could have lights in the kitchen; I don’t plan to do any more oven debugging here.