Daily Archives: August 6, 2024

Aug6

Exploring Cassis

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Saturday, 06-July-2024 through 18-July-2024



I explored Cassis!

Technically this started before any of my previous posts… but I wanted to set the stage before we dove into the play itself. Seems right, you know?


So Cassis.

Small town on the French Riviera. The Cote De Azur, in French. A tourist town, a fishing town, and a sea-side town down by the Mediterranean. An absolutely cute town, with a billion different restaurants and shops and other great places to walk and explore.

Small alleyways with beautiful growing plants. A few friendly cats to say hi to. Limestone streets, worn smooth by countless sandals, with day markets and night markets every so often.

Siestas halfway through the day, to avoid the midday heat, followed by late-evening dinners that last past sundown.

It wasn’t a bad spot. Daniel picked well, when he first proposed the trip back in 2014, and I followed up beautifully when suggesting my Mom and Steve come visiting.



Keeping with Tradition, I kept a list of the various places that I, and we, ate. There’s a lot of them, so bear with me:

  • Le Luminyen – Actually by the University of Luminy, I ate here after my walk up Mt. Pugot. Still, very good and worth visiting for a snack
  • Alcazar – My first meal in Cassis itself. Excellent food, though a bit unexpected… I ordered Fries and Paella… but the “Fries” were actually fried Sardines! Unexpected, but delicious.
  • Le Delphine – A quick and simple brunch, with pastries and fried eggs and a latte. Can’t complain… but I found that eggs aren’t really a breakfast thing in Cassis, unless they’re in a quiche.
  • Midday Express – Excellent hot sandwiches, quick and easy and great for taking before my hikes into Les Calanques
  • La Voûte – Great rissoto, mediocre burgers. Lesson learned here – In France, order French food. Or Italian, if you’re in Cassis. But don’t order American… it’s just not worth it.
  • Bistro’quai – Solid food, though I frankly can’t recall any real details here.
  • Le 8 et demi – Means “8.5” in French, though I’d give them a solid 10. Great pizza, great food, excellent Crepes. We went here at least 3 times, if I remember right.
  • Nomade – Amazing bakery. Seriously, simply glorious croissants, pain au chocolate, everything.
  • Le Petit Oyster Bar – Excellent oysters, glorious mussels, amazing charcuterie boards… what more could you want? Ohh right, great wine! It’s France, of course there’s great wine!
  • La Tarte Tropézienne – Amazing place, went quite a few times to pick up pastries for breakfast and tartes for dessert!
  • La Stazione – Excellent Italian food in the heart of a French town. Good pasta, good wine, good times!
Aug6

A car accident in France

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Sunday, 07-July-2024


On the drive home from picking my Mom and Steve up from the airport, a challenging situation arose.

As the title suggests, I got in a car accident.

I’d rented a car, since Cassis is a good ways from Marseille and we were considering taking some day trips into central France. I wasn’t too worried about it – France is a bit crazy with their driving (everyone is training to be an F1 racer. EVERYONE.) but they’re fairly predictable… at least in my opinion. And, frankly, I was confident – I’d driven in France and Spain before, and come out from it none the worse for wear.


I won’t include photos here, because car accident, but understand that it was thankfully quite simple and minor. It took a while to deal with, of course, but there wasn’t any blood and both vehicles seemed to work perfectly fine afterward. I also won’t include details here, since there was a police report… and I’ll let them stick to the official details.

Instead, the point of this post is to walk through what I did, and how I did it, during the parts that happened after the vehicles stopped moving.


Mainly, I shut up.

See, I don’t speak fluent (or conversational) French. Because of that, heated communication in an emotional time isn’t an ideal situation or decision. So, I shut up.

I moved the car out of the way, and let people do their thing. A car stopped to help, the police arrived, and we used Google Translate when necessary. I shut up. I was ignored, which isn’t pleasant… but far preferable to the alternative of being thrown off the side of the road by over-energetic bystanders who are sick of tourists.

I answered the questions posed, and kept the extra details to a minimum. And, 90min later, we were back on the road.

It wasn’t pleasant, and definitely took me a few days to fully recover from… but I’m okay with that. It happened, and we were able to move on from it. That, at the end of the day, is the only important part.