The Calanques are closed... grrrrr

Our goal today was to do the longest of the three walks in the Calanques National Park. The park (the most famous of the parks with the special types of rock formations) is halfway between Toulon and Marseille.

The photos from the Calanques are up on Flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645762756254/

I had previously been apprehensive about visiting the Calanques, based on the propensity for park staff to close them during 'adverse weather conditions', and they are pretty pansy when it comes to leaving the parks open.

Having decided to make the trip anyway, we drove to the car park, where there is direct access to the place where the walks start through a bus. The return fare was quite cheap, because we had heard that parking was terrible near the Calanques.

After being dropped at the trail head, it was about a 15-20 minute walk to the start of the longest of the Calanques walks. When we got there, we found out that they had closed it less than 10 minutes before we arrived, due to the wind that was around. It wasn't exactly hot, so we were naturally disappointed. We instead decided to walk back to the trail head and do the smaller, 90-minute round trip out to the closer headland, which is open all year, regardless of weather conditions.

The results were quite spectacular. Despite the fact that we didn't see 'The Calanques', the geology and the colour of the water was amazing. Dad even got to have a swim in the Mediterranean while I sat on the 'beach', which was actually a rocky shoreline. Because of the winds that were up, there were almost waves. Almost. All the locals I'm sure don't even understand what a wave actually is.

 My favourites from the Calanques area

That ended up being most of what we did for the day. We now have two days of travelling ahead of us before we get to Lucca, which is just north of Pisa. We'll travel through more of the Azure Coast in France, as well as Liguria in Italy.