Heading for Italy

4-11-2010
Originally uploaded by cspatrick

Thursday, November 4, 2010 Day 127
We caught the 9:40 train out of Montpellier heading to Italy this morning. Our goal was to get out of France before Saturday's general strike started. We feared it might start early, and we wanted to be safely out of the country before then. We traveled through Nimes, then around Lac de Ste. Croix, which is a huge lake, then Marseilles, then Toulon, Nice, Monaco, and Ventimiglia in Italy. The view was lovely the whole way, mountains, the lake, the coastal plain. Interestingly enough, the train station in Monte Carlo was built in tunnel so they didn’t have to use the precious real estate for the station.
We arrived in Ventimiglia at 4:00, and before we left the station, we bought our tickets for tomorrow’s trip to Milan. The lines at the windows were long, so we found a self-serve kiosk and bought them there. It occurred to us, however, that they were not correct – they had today’s date on them and we were afraid they were not sufficient for tomorrow’s train. The information line was short, so we asked the guy there about the tickets, and he said they were not correct, that we would need to exchange them. He gave us a printed schedule. So we stood in line for the ticket sales and the guy there insisted that we had the correct tickets. We gave our best imitation of a Gallic shrug, left and walked to our hotel. It was located along the waterfront a good 20 minutes from the station, but the walk was lovely and we didn’t much mind. We had a beautiful view from our hotel window of the sea and the setting sun.