After a rather long cross country rail journey of nine and a half hours from Aix-en-Provence to Arcachon (via Marseille and Bordeaux) it was nice to arrive and breath in the sea air. On the approaches to Arcachon you could tell things were different from Provence. The houses looked very neat, the streets looked tidier and the trains did not seem to have the same amount of graffiti as they did in/around Marseille. As we walked from the station to the hotel Arcacho...

The journey from Reims to Aix-en-Provence involved four trains with changes at Champagne-Ardennes TGV (the out of town station for Reims on the eastern high speed line), Marne-La-Vallée (adjacent to Disneyland Paris) and Marseille St Charles. The journey was scheduled to take six hours, including comfortable connection times, with the vast majority of the trip on board TGV services. With the exception of being a few minutes late into Marseille, everything wo...

Our hotel in Reims (pronounced as 'Ranse' in French) was just a short walk from the station, rooms on one side of the hotel would have overlooked the station but that would also have come with a fair amount of noise. Our room looked out over a fairly quiet road on the front of the hotel. Reims is famous for a few things some of which I was aware of and others I had no idea about. Champagne is probably number one on the list of what the city is known for and some ...

Travelling by TGV to Rennes left us with just a one hour drive to reach Malestroit. With the exception of a garden full of massive weeds the house was pretty much as we left it at the end of May - hopefully the weedkiller will help keep things at bay at the end of the summer growing period before we return in October. With the weather being rather glorious we enjoyed a wander around Malestroit before enjoy a drink in the main square ahead of dinner at the 'Pont 9...

On the first part of our holiday in France we were joined by my Mum and her friend Chris and involved travelling on Eurostar to Lille. Lille was a convenient overnight stop rather than trying to make the journey all the way to Brittany in one day and as a city makes for a great place to visit and is far less busy than Paris which was our other option. Our hotel, the Balladines, situated opposite Lille Flandres railway station was a ten minute walk from Lille Euro...