To Marseille

May 8, 2025

"All happy train journeys are alike; each unhappy train journey is unhappy in its own way.". Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin

Who knew that Anna Karenina's husband was an early bicyclist, or have heard of his frustration trying to cross the Stans on a penny-farthing and trying to cram it into the trains of the day whenever one could be found? The imagination reels. It makes our little frustrations seem small by comparison. It's important to keep perspective.

First though, let's back up and explain ourselves. We booked ourselves in this ridiculous sixth floor studio apartment in the old city with an elevator for four nights, but have decided to write off the fourth night and leave early. Partly we decided on this because we really detest this place, but it was an easy sale when I raised up the idea with Rachael, who agreed instantly after I explained my thinking. As you'll have guessed by now, trains are involved.

Our next stay after we leave here is in Saint-Martin d'Ardeche, where we've booked ourselves for two nights in the hopes that we'll get favorable weather and I can bike up the Gorges d'Ardeche, re-living one of my favorite memories from our first tour of Europe 32 years ago. To get there we have a three part train journey, all on regional trains: first to Marseille, then to Avignon, and finally to Pont Saint-Esprit, after which we have an easy seven mile ride up to Saint-Martin. If we make all of our connections, we should arrive at our destination around five.

The sticking point though is the train from Marseille to Avignon. It's a regional, but one that requires reservation of bike space in advance, as well as the purchase of a bike add-on fee from the local region. The train we have reserved space on leaves Marseille at 1:30. To get there we have to catch the regional train from Nice, which leaves every two hours and takes around two and a half. Only two choices are available on the morning of our planned travel: one at 7:30 and one at 9:30. Our plan was to try to catch the 7:30 train, so that if things go awry we still have a second chance.

We were already concerned about this whole strategy, which it was easy to imagine might end in fiasco. But now it's certain. There's no way in hell that we'll get ourselves, our bikes and all the rest of our crap downstairs and out the door and bike the mile and a half to the Nice train station in time to get ticketed and board the 7:30 train. Even making the 9:30 sounds ambitious.

So, we're breaking it up and going to Marseille today instead. We've booked ourselves into an apartment hotel midway between the Saint-Charles station and the historic old port, with the plan that we'll catch the 11:30 train and arrive in Marseille in time to bike down to the waterfront for lunch. To allow ourselves plenty of time, we plan on leaving the apartment at 9:45. Even with the stairs and elevator to deal with we should have no problem making the train station with nearly two hours to work with.

Before we leave though, let's look around this apartment that we expect to remember and talk about in the future more than most places we've stayed.

Pretty crowded. That's the bedroom on the left, with the doorless opening to the uncomfortably small bathroom with the toilet that's so hard to sit down on and get up from next to the bed. On the right is the entrance/exit doorway, with the bikes crammed into a small space next to it.

And let's not forget the lack of useable space and surfaces, or the stupid couch whose cushions slide off when you sit on it.

Aah, but the views! We're on the sixth floor in Old Nice! How romantic can that be?

So we ace the first part of the test, and have mostly vacated the room at 9:45. Together we carry my bike down the six steps to the elevator landing, and while I pull the stem and call the elevator Rachael lugs the panniers down to the landing also. Then she holds the door open while I squeeze myself and the bike in (and thanks again, Michael!). The door closes, I select the ground floor, and I wait at the bottom until Rachael arrives and can help extricate me. I reassemble my bike and prop it on that landing and then go back into the elevator and ride it up again to load the panniers. I holler down to Rachael when I'm done so she can call the elevator to bring them down to her. And while she hauls them down the nine steep stairs at the bottom to the small space by the door to the street I go back up to the room to get her bike, take a last look around, and then carefully carry it down the stairs and load it into the elevator. It's just enough smaller than my bike that it barely fits without pulling the stem, thankfully.

So finally everything is at the lowest level. Rachael helps me out of the elevator, we unfold her bike and carry it down to the front door and then go back up for mine, and finally make it out on street and start loading the bikes. It only takes a half-hour, which we're pretty proud of. We picked the right plan, and everything went well. The only thing that could have made it go faster would be a healthy set of knees, but that will have to wait for some other season down the road.

So the bikes are loaded and it's only about 10:15. We've still got over an hour to bike to the train station and get ourselves ticketed, so we're in good shape. First though we have to drop the keys off at the lockbox at the office around the corner. Unfortunately though we failed to find the message that gave us the combination to the office and our lockbox (it's sort of like an Amazon locker for apartment key drops). We stare at both of our phones and my iPad looking for the message but can't find it, and in desperation Rachael finally sends a message to the host through the Airbnb app before we finally find the instructions. Which takes fifteen minutes.

And then another five minutes goes to the best part of the morning when I turn around and find a man walking down the street in a tour group stopped to look carefully at my bike. It's Floyd, from Denver. He's interested in my bike because he has a Bike Saturday, the recumbent version of the Bike Friday. We trade stories and experiences, and Rachael and I are amazed and impressed when Floyd tells us that he's biked in 108 countries. 108! Wow!!

Hey, Floyd! I hope you found your way to this website. If you do, register yourself (it's free and pretty self-explanatory) and drop a comment so we can get in touch. It would be great to get together someday when we're back in the states.

Still, we're good for time - even though the first few blocks are slow and mostly walked as we work our way out of the narrow, crowded lanes of Old Nice to the waterfront and can start biking. We make it to the train station at around 11, with nearly a half hour to get ticketed and to our departure gate, which is already listed as gate C. It should be plenty of time.

It's not enough time, and we miss the train. We're not even close. I'm standing third in line at a ticketing kiosk while a group of five French persons is trying to purchase their tickets. Ten minutes later I'm still waiting, getting more and more frustrated and anxious as I wonder why in the hell they can't just make their decisions and get on with it. They don't even have any language barriers to deal with!

While I wait, the husband of the woman immediately in front of me checks to see if any of the other kiosks is any better, but comes back with discouraging news. Finally I give up and start looking around myself. There are four or five other kiosks that sell tickets for the regional train, but they all have problems and several say they're out of service. There's apparently some sort of network problem, and they're all down. We're really running out of time now, so we try two tracks. I walk to the far end of the station to the ticket office and stand in a very long, very slow-moving line. It's long because everyone else is in the same boat we're in, of course. And while I wait I call Rachael to have her see if she can book us through the phone using the SNCF app (something we should have done earlier ourselves of course). That goes slowly and frustratingly, but she's just getting there with the phone right when I make it up to the front of the line and get our tickets.

But by then it's too late, of course. Our train is just leaving, so with almost two hours to kill we get snacks at a nearby snack shop and then return to the station to wait for our train to come up on the departure board and its gate to be announced. And then we endure a stressful period when it looks like we might miss this train too, because it takes so long for the gate to be announced and because we can't figure out how to get through the access gates because the ticket scanner is apparently out of service too and we can't tell which elevator we need to take and on and on and on.

But finally we make the train. And the train itself is great, actually. There's an abundance of space for bikes in the last car with several large rooms where we can just lean them against the wall and not hang them on hooks. They're obviously set up on the Nice-Marseille line for heavy bike traffic. Once we get on the train, the ride itself is excellent and relaxing.

Not so the arrival at the Saint-Charles station though, a confusing place to figure out how to escape by bicycle. At least it's not as bad as when we were here two years ago by accident, when we failed to get off at Tarascon and found ourselves riding to Marseille and arriving about nine at night, in the dark, frustrated, and in need of a hotel. It's a confusing place, but at least it's not dark out this time.

Even in broad daylight though it's not easy finding our way to our hotel for some reason. There's a problem with the Garmin route so we use the phone, Google maps keeps trying to route us annd our bikes down staircases, the traffic is bad, the neighborhoods are sketchy, but we finally make it. But our apartment hotel, once we arrive, is excellent. So all's well that ends well. Except all's not ended, of course. We're only in Marseille. There are still two more trains to manage tomorrow.

For dinner we walk a short distance down to a cheapo Thai restaurant next to the old port, and afterwards we grab gelati and sit on a bench by the waterfront watching the world go by until it's time to head back to the room. and we're both a little surprised by what a good impression the port area makes. It's quite attractive and very multiethnic and multicultural, and a great place to just sit and look. Neither of us is much for big cities, but I can imagine coming here some day and exploring the city for a few days.

Today's ride: 3 miles (5 km)
Total: 541 miles (871 km)

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Lyle McLeodOMG, forgive us, but we’re lying in bed laughing out loud. But it sounds like you survived with an ability to laugh a little bit too.
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