Esterel Mountains & Trip Costs -- June, 2012

The first time I went through this Esterel mountain area was on the train in 1977.  I thought it looked like New Mexico with an ocean.  It still does.  I always wanted to go back.  Even though we got lost in some of the 1%'s golf resorts inland for awhile, we were able to drive along part of the stunning coast road between St-Raphael and Cannes.  It made me want to go back and stay in this area if we could ever afford it.  In fact my woulda, coulda, shoulda thoughts hit me and made me wish that there are such things as souls that live multiple lives so I could hope for one along this coast.

My pictures are totally inadequate as usual, so here's a link to some on Google.  This is what we saw as we drove.

It wasn't as crowded as I thought it might be.  That's probably because it's so expensive.

The red hills coming down to the blue water were as beautiful as I remembered.

I am always amazed that the Med is as clear as it is after all these thousands of years of occupation by humans.

Red rocks are great and almost made us consider retiring to St. George, UT.

But add in blue water and you just want to look at it forever.  I made this my wallpaper as soon as I loaded the pictures onto my computer.

Yeah, there is a little money in the area.

 

Like I said, maybe in some other life.

 

OK, this is the part where the joy meets the sorrow, the fun has its consequences, when I remind myself of how we are following through on our promise to the kids that they will have no inheritance beyond what they can pawn our stuff for.

 

The total trip cost was $10,650 for 28 days.  That's about $380 per day for the 2 of us or $190 per person per day not counting airfare.  That's about what Rick Steves says it should cost for a moderate to cheap trip to Europe.  We usually plan on about $200 per day per person.  Could we do it cheaper?  Sure.  Do we want to?  Nope. 

 

We got by really cheap this time because we were able to fly standby thanks to Lee, but we won't always be able to do that.  Typical round trip airfares per person are about $1500 from Tucson.  To us, that still isn't all that expensive. 

 

Here's how the costs broke down into categories, from the most expensive to the least.

 

$3935 -- Lodging.  Includes the apartments and the hotels.  It includes breakfasts in the hotels when it was part of the lodging cost.

 

$3155 -- Food.  Includes all food we had to pay for extra.  About 10% of it was food bought in grocery stores.  The rest was eating out.  Obviously, eating more at home or picnicing  would save us lots of money if we wanted or needed to do that.

 

$1675 -- Transportation. Includes the small fees for the flights, car rental and fuel, public transportation including trains, buses, taxis and tips and ... speeding tickets.

 

$1125 -- Entertainment.  Includes the river cruise with the food, Le Mans, Paris museum passes for both of us and all other fees for sites, tour guides and karting.  We typically do not spend as much on entertainment as others might.  We probably could put a big portion of the driving costs in this category since that is entertainment for us.

 

$760 -- Sundries.  This includes non-food items bought in places other than grocery stores, post cards and stamps, souvenirs, gifts for the dog-sitter and foreign transaction fees for credit card purchases and ATM withdrawals. 

 

So there you have it.  Not counted above is the 362 Euros I brought home with us.  That's about $450 at the time we bought them.  I decided to keep them rather than sell them to the one place in town I can.  That way we will have some Euros in our pockets when we arrive in Amsterdam in the spring without having to buy them here before we go.

 



The Camargue -- June, 2012

We spent one day driving west from Aix.  My primary goal was to drive around the Camargue.  It is a wetlands area famous for its white horses, black bulls and wealth of birds.  The horses are considered to be one of the most ancient breeds in the world.  The cattle are also native to this area.  Both the horses and the cattle live in semi-wild conditions in the marshy lands of the Camargue.  Except for those that have been domesticized, of course. 

The Camargue is western Europe's largest river delta and is located south of Arles between the Grande Rhone and Petit Rhone rivers.  We drove down the west road all the way to Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. 

I hadn't really thought much about this being a seaside resort area, but it is.  You go through lots of relatively wild marshy land and end up in a cool little town (population about 2300) with a lovely beach.  From what we saw, it would be a good place to vacation with a family.  I was glad we were there on a Monday when it wasn't crowded.

We walked along a paved path at the edge of the beach.

 

 

I'm sure it's beautiful at night with these lights.

We were hungry.  When are we not?  So we scoped out the few restaurants on the beach and chose one.  We sat outside and moved once due to the smokers.  I faced this mirror and got a pretty good reflection of the beach houses and the lights.

Trout mostly looked at the beach.  If you look closely, you can see me in the mirror taking the picture.

We had managed to find a decent parking place.  We took the long way back to it, which wasn't long at all.  This cowboy on a Camargue horse with a Camargue bull was the centerpiece of a traffic circle.

So was this fishing sailboat.

Trout wanted to be sure I got a picture of the birds flying around the cathedral.

Here's a traffic circle with a Camargue horse.

Some of the horses are tamed and you can ride them.  There were lots of places along the road where that was possible.

I preferred seeing them like this.

There is a huge bird sanctuary to be visited.  Trout's back was killing him, so he stayed in the car while I went in and walked around.  There is a total of 7KM of trails.  Needless to say, I didn't cover all of them.  But I saw enough to get a taste.

There are other critters in this environment -- especially nutria.

 

I'm not a bird expert, but I think these are storks.

This is some kind of raptor.

And what used to be my favorite bird -- lots of flamingos.  They are the signature bird of the sanctuary and they are everywhere. 

 

It's funny when they play follow the leader.

This leader got way out in front.

But you mostly see them feeding in groups.

There are egrets.

And cranes.

 

And islands through the rushes.

And lots of different birds nesting in the salt ceder trees.

These owls were great.

 

 

 

 

 

And here's another hawk of some kind.

 

 

 

 

This is not my first rodeo, so I decided to make use of the facilities before getting back on the road.  I thought these were uniquely designed.

 

 

 

They were more unique than I imagined.







 

 

So that was our brief visit to the Camargue.  We started getting a little goofy on the drive and since the horses are often referred to as the horses of the Camargue, we started calling everything we saw the xxxxx  "of the Camargue."  Even the near-elderly can be juvenile upon occasion.