The great dragonfruit swindle

With the prospect of markets before our midday train, we were up early to make sure we arrived at 8am. 

The "mainly food" markets where breakfast would be found seemed to have no food markets. No worries, as there would be a boulangerie somewhere. Luckily we found one, selected our pastry of choice and found a park bench in the only part of town that we hadn't seen yesterday. 

The body is a bit confused eating a single pastry for breakfast. How would it survive without the "hash browns special" from previous weeks?

Fueled up, we started the long walk through the markets. Hundreds of stalls that lined the street in front of us. Walking and walking slowly, we managed to get through unscathed, apart from the obligatory tea towel purchase that accompanies any holiday. Finally, the long lines of toys and clothes and records ended.

To amuse myself, I have now begun to count the number of records that I have at home while flicking through the LPs section that most markets have. Today it was 4, including an album I purchased last holidays in Europe and a Demis Roussos album. 

You remember Demis? He used to be on the Don Lane show a lot. You remember Don Lane? I better stop here as I imagine the answer is negative.

Miraculously, when the "various stuff" markets finished, we found the food markets, which also stretched forever. In fact, with time running out before departure, we didn't manage to finish.

Vietnamese noodles and salad, plus cherries, we purchased for our train trip.

Back home we went to heat up our noodles, eat an ice cream, struggle with suitcases on the stairs and finally walk the 1km to the train station.

The train was almost on time, we managed to find some spare luggage space and a comfortable trip was completed to Carcassone, where Jeremy was to meet us and spend a few days before we left for home.

The bonus was he had Emma with him. Babies and Editors do not travel lightly so I did the right thing and nominated to travel in the luggage compartment.

With check in not ready, we headed to Maccas where the brand new dragonfruit Sprite was recommended. Yuck. I was duped. It tasted like artificial sweetener. 

I've been to some towns with tiny streets but fitting the wide EV through these streets was an effort.

Accommodation found, Emma rested, crepes for dinner, a random World Cup game watched and it was bed time. Unfortunately, a 10 month old baby in a different bed and teething is not the best recipe for a great night's sleep, but the positives outweigh the negatives as she inches slowly from being a bundle of crawling energy to one who is very close to walking.

Our accommodation is nice but every now and then there is a wafting of, depending on your nose, a smell of cigarettes, BO, wet dog, or mould in the air. Turns out it's my towel waiting to dry me.

A better day

Today was about walking around, buying some some stuff, taking some pics and not getting angry in A Vietnamese restaurant.

3 out of 4 ain't bad.

Arles is a pretty nice town. Lots of Roman ruins, old buildings, art, flowers and food. (Ed. Van Gogh painted a lot of scenes here, which are indicated on signs).

First stop after showering off the residual heat from last night's "sleep", was a boulangerie (translation: French bakery).

Croissant for the Editor and pizza slice for me. I'm liking this place.

We walked, bought stuff that would definitely suit the new house (a metal hook shaped like a chilli) and an icy cold bottle of Coke that the Triple M black thunders of the 80's would have been proud to give away (it cost euro 2.50).

We walked, no stress, found where lunch would be eaten and then walked more before returning to Le Vietnam restaurant.

Seated in front of a welcome fan, I chose the pho and the Editor Plate 6. 

First up they didn't have any pho. It's 12:20. Where the hell did it go? So I chose the Saigon Soup (also pho).

What is the intrinsic difference between Plate 6 and the many other Plate numbers on offer?

Well Dear reader, Plate 6 had FRESH spring rolls, not FRIED.

Unfortunately this was not a fact that the chef was aware of, so when fried spring rolls arrived, you could cut the tension with the red chop sticks waiting on the table.

The waiter looked Vietnamese, probably spoke Vietnamese and French, and maybe spoke (without understanding), some goodly English.

The Editor, despite daily French lessons on Duo Lingo, did not know how to say "you @@@#ed up my order" when her Plate 6 turned up totally fried.

As I sipped my substitute pho, trying to eat slowly, the back and forth between waiter and Editor went on.

It was finally settled when she pointed to the word Fresh on the menu, got him to admit that fresh meant wrapped in rice paper and as he took her plate 6 away said that she "just didn't want everything fried".

What turned up next?

That's right, a fresh spring roll, minus the rest of plate 6's contents of salad, prawn things and other prawn things.

I had finished lunch by now. Why did I not video?

Then some minutes later, by some miracle, Plate 6, as advertised, had arrived.

I tried to sleep as she ate. Aren't holidays fun?

We headed back to the room exhausted by the day, got the aircon to actually spit out cold air and had a good sleep for an hour or 2. Where was this cold air last night?

Fresh from our Nana nap in our house,

we went in search of food to cook for dinner, and after a failed attempt in some sort of hippy whole foods place, found a real supermarket (where Pepsi and chips are sold).

We cooked and ate, used the wifi to catch up on Youtube on Aussie shows we had missed and slept in the chilly 19 degrees of the now working aircon (it was the batteries' fault last night).

The longest day

Up at 6:30 for our last ship breakfast, made our last lunch for later in the day and off we went.

8am taxi was good.

We caught  the 9:16 train to the Spanish French border at Cerbére. No problems.

We had a long wait between trains so Annette went for a walk and found a lovely rocky beach.

Got on the next train and all was good until we got up to 10 minutes before arrival at Narbonne and the train stopped. We kept getting messages that our train was delayed over and over again until we arrived over 30 minutes late.

In a panic, the Editor and her suitcase headed for the ticket office to rearrange our travel. From this point on I carried both our bags up and down all the stairs.

After some time we were sent to a platform to catch a train. At the top of the stairs we waved goodbye to our train as it disappeared in the distance.

Back to the ticket office.

Each trip meant going down, then up, stairs.

We had to wait ages for a train to Avignon and then to Arles. Our 3 train trip turned to 4 and we arrived 2 hours late at around 8pm.

Through the bumpy streets we walked, hoping that Google maps wouldn't crap its pants like it often does.

Finally we arrived and as a final insult, I got to carry both suitcases up a narrow flight of stairs to our room.

Quickly we hit the footpath in search of food. A Burger King sign was seen earlier and it closed at 1am.

We walked and walked and finally arrived. 

8am to 9:39pm from Ship to Burger King when I finally sank my teeth into my Korean Burger.

To this point, the 2 mini buns with salad we each made was what we had eaten, plus some emergency corn chips.

Half a litre of Coke never tasted this good. The Editor is regretting the choice of a visit to Arles.

Finally back to our room for a good night's sleep and it's hot hot hot, and the air conditioner won't start. More regrets.

Finally it starts, but is mainly ineffective as I spend the night with my feet against the wall where my head should be, because the wall is cool. Did I mention the bed creaked ever time you thought about moving?

Note: Had we stayed on platform D when our train arrived late, our intended next train would have then arrived on the same platform, despite the fact that they texted us welcoming us on the train.

Today was not a good day.

Been there done that

We've been to Palma De Mallorca before, (read the blog from last time) so we didn't need to do much.

We walked to the bus stop about 15 minutes away because paying 3 euros on a local bus is better than 20 us dollars on the ship-organised shuttle. It's Sunday and most of the shops are closed so we walked around a bit and headed back to the ship. 

Lunch, gym, arvo tea, reading, depending on who you are.

We did see the second half of the Socceroos vs Turkiye game at 6 this morning and are now packing for our departure at Barcelona tomorrow.

A successful cruise, maybe 2 days shorter would have been enough, and only 1 week left of the holiday.

One last meal in the dining room and then to use my 1 hour of complimentary wifi now that my sim card has run out (fyi 12gb of data over 1 month).

One last washing and drying load is being completed and then it's on to dry land tomorrow.

The last few days were a bit boring. I apologise.

My dining experience was not great. Obviously the sight of me busting out of my shirt got back to the chef, who decided that any plurals on the menu would not be recognised. The 1 croquette main meal was the main protagonist.

The ladies who we were talking to at the adjacent table thought it was an entree. Ed: By the way, you may notice the menu does list Entrees; they've decided to use the American way of referring to main meals as entrees (I think I need to research the history of that as it makes no sense).

One of them had the rhubarb pavlova dessert and then waited for us to see what we thought of it. We chose poorly. The looks on our faces may just have been one of the highlights of her holidays. 

I had to go to the buffet before it closed, just to stave off starvation.

The seas were angry today my friends, plus what happened yesterday.

Before we talk about today's sea story, let's talk about yesterday's sea day. 

But first, to what I've been doing in my spare time. I like writing, and I like milk, so I wrote a book on the history of milk. Unfortunately, milk has been around such a long time, that my initial draft was over 1,800 pages, which is way too big for a book, so I've had to do a shortened version, a condensed milk version, I would say.

So yesterday was your standard sea day. I ran for an hour on the treadmill in the morning, or the late morning because breakfast takes a while to settle. Annette went to a talk on terrorism and then headed to the buffet area to do some new house and garden planning (Ed. because they had tables and I was using my laptop). I found her there and had a chocolate brownie with chocolate ice cream because that is what you need to recover after a run. 

Lunch, rest and then to the gym for both of us around 4. I need to work on my abs a little in case the guy in the acrobatics group gets injured and they need me to come off the bench.

Then, I finally made an appearance in the pool. Why is it so hot? Why is the spa so extra hot?

Buffet dinner, looked for the opening world cup game on the sport channel, then sleep.

Some time at maybe 4 or 5am, there was lots of noise and creaking and a noticeable swaying of the cabin. It woke us up. I continued to sleep, sort of, with my mp3 mask on (yes, a total blackout mask with inbuilt earphones. Do yourself a favour and get some).

Annette decided that it was too much for her and at approximately 5:39am when I decided to go to the toilet, she thought it was the right time to throw up.

I went back to bed and she wandered to the deck in an attempt to feel better. 

It was very windy apparently and we were in a notorious location for roughish seas. It's 10pm when writing this and we have similar conditions minus the vomit. A bit of swaying, lots of noise and potentially no sleep tonight (but I did find the world cup channel).

So today was Valletta, Malta. We figured the normal 4ish hours on land and back for lunch. We were docked on the wrong side of the harbour so had to catch a shuttle ferry for 5 minutes.

First stop via walking way too far was the high elevator that goes up to ... wait for it ... the old town. 

A totally different one to the others. More jewellery shops to trap a passing editor, lots of restaurants and around 7,000 people jostling for position from the 3 cruise ships in port. 

We took a few wrong turns today and every one of them meant a long walk back up many steps.

The main wrong turn was looking for a ferry across to another fortress. We found it eventually, got a seniors price in, used their facilities and got the ferry back.

Our only problem then was getting back to wherever the shuttle ferry back to our ship left from. 

We stumbled upon a sign that said cruise ships, found our ferry and made it back on board at about 4:30pm. We never got around to lunch, but the burger bar was open to save our lives. Dinner and a show. Sleep on roughish but not vomit inducing seas.

Day 3 in the same post.

Another sea day, gym, food, gym food, sleep.