Marseille

Marseille has been full of beaches and new friends. We've been here for 4 days now and been to the beach 4 times, pretty good record. Yesterday we went with our new Ozi friends to a national park for some hiking and maybe some beaching but we weren't sure if we would find a beach. It was a nice 80 degrees out so after breakfast we made some lunches and headed off to the bus station. 5 minutes down the road we saw thousands of people in the streets and signs and banners and trucks blasting music, craziness! We had no idea what it was but we were in the middle of it. 2010 french revolution? we finally found our bus stop but none of the buses were running since all the street were blocked off so we hopped the metro to a bus station a little ways out of down and about a half hour later we were on the trail. It was good to get out of the city and back to our roots in the mountains. Will and Cal had done there fair share of walk-abouts in Australia so they kept up with us mountain boys. We got to the top of a peak and ate lunch with amazing views. We were mostly on trails and did a little bushwhacking too. We were looking for a beach that we'd seen online but after 2 hours I was beginning to think we were chasing gold at the end of a rainbow. We kept pushing on and next thing you know we came over a crest and were blown away with a picture perfect beach and little villa just like the picture. we scrambled down to the water and all jumped right in. Crystal blue water and sail boats anchored just off shore combined with some lovely topless French girls and 30 foot cliffs to jump off- we were in heaven! we spent the rest of the day on the beach and hiked out on the road which only took about an hour. The craziness of the rally that had stopped and we think it might have been a bus strike? But we rode the bus and it seemed to be on schedule so who knows. We watched the Dutch Oranje clean up Cameroon and made a pasta feast with our ozi buddies. We spent the rest of the night having dollar beers from the convenience store 2 doors down and playing cards with the ozi's and some other girls we had met in the hostel. The guy at the convenience stopped asking us "what'll it be?" and started asking "how many?" after the 3rd beer run. We said bye to Cal and Will since there were supposed to catch a train this morning but when we rolled out of bed they were still here, i guess catching trains and hangovers don't go well together. Today we plan to see some sights in marseille and probably hit the beach too.
We've lucked out with weather and haven't seen a cloud. Another wonderful day in France.
We leave tomorrow and we have Lyon and Paris left, we're making the most of it.
So for now, Merci Marseille, and au revoir!