The penultimate day looms for 7/9 ths of the passengers onboard, only 99 are staying on to the next cruise. Unsurprisingly the tender today was ram packed with seemingly everyone wanting to get off for their last port of call, in the delightful Frence town of Bandol which i had not even heard of until booking this holiday.
We set off walking round the lovely bay, past the marina and then casino before hitting the beaches, which looked great if you are interested in lying on a beach! But we continued to walk around, past the viaduct, and out of Bandol, heading into Sanary sur Mare, even though we will be in this town next week. We noticed the beaches turned more rocky, but this does not detract Sunday Sun worshippers, it's a scrum to get a space on the beach properly demarcated before the next person turns up.
Up a slight incline and we're off the coast and into another millionaires paradise of secluded homes hanging off the hillside, overlooking the sea, we saw some lovely 'little pads' as we walked! Finally we ended up At the end of the bay, today not a tip but a water treatment works, equally as fragrant until we went upwind, but we found a great spot for elevenses overlooking the amazing bay we'd walked around. We also noticed on of the Sea Cloud ex Seabourn ships settled in the Sanary side of the bay where we will be next week.
Having already ascertained there's not too much to do we were quite content to make our day the walk, rather than the destination, so we turned round and started heading back along the same route. Of course, seeing things backwards always means seeing something new, so we still enjoyed our walk back to Bandol. Some 8.2 miles in total, before we heading into the town to find the Marie, which we later discovered we'd already walked past. Finally we head back to the tender station and some welcome cool towels from the wonderful ship's staff.
We quickly dashed back to our room to remove boots then headed upstairs for burger and Chardonnay but sadly had to make do with Pinot Grigiot for now. Then it was down to the after deck on five for pool, jacuzzi and cocktails for a couple of hours.
We headed back around 17:00 to get ready to receive visitors, we had invited our nearest two sets of neighbours, Margaret & David and Ruth & David, for a final drinks party before they leave tomorrow. Our stewardess had gone 'overboard' with provisions but they were really appreciated by all. We then dragged them all up to eight to experience the Epicurean extravaganza of food stalls all handing out gloriously fine quality meats, drinks, breads, sushi, caviar and so on.
After the event finished we sat down with the outgoing cruise director David E for an hour of drinks and some great laughs before going down later than normal to a super a Thomas Keller dinner in the MDR. Exhausted we returned to sort out the blog and try to upload photos again, these having failed all day so far today!
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