Travelling to Southern France, Port Vendres

Port Vendres Bay

View of the Courts from above

Walking up the mountain of Port Vendres lugging all our stuff

Sitting next to a very large Monsieur on the train

Train Station beer - called Koenigsbier - shout of to Koenig

We are finally set up down south!! It toook us over two days to get down here! Our train to Paris was pretty smooth, but when we got there it turns out that our train down into Port Vendres, where the tourny is, was full! We tried to squeeze onto it, but they only had first class. Also, Marc has still been unable to get access to his debit card and his credit card wasnt working so we had a huge debacle at the bank trying to get money. We found a train that left on Friday night at 22h 56 to Toulose, which is in the interior of the Southern France county were going into, but it was close enough. We finally convinced the train manager to sell us the last tickets, which were 136 euros and we only had 110 euros in cash. The train was leaving in 20 minutes, so I sprinted, literally SPRINTED back into Paris and found a bank to withdraw 30 euros. I came back sweating bullets about 10 minutes before the train left, we paid, and ran onto the train about 2 minutes before it took off.

We got sitting seats (no bed) on a ten hour train and it was pretty bad for sleeping. That was just the beginning though, because we got in Saturday morning around 6:30 to Toulose and realized that we really had no money besides Marc's credit card. Eventually we were able to use the card to buy a train ticket to Narbonne, and then into Port Vendres to arrive around 3 pm. So we got some beers in the train station, a baguette, and played cards for a long time and just joked around. It ended up being pretty fun... arriving in Narbonne was great because it was finally Southern weather, really hot and a bit windy and the feel of the town was just so different from the castle towns of Normandy. We got onto what we thought would be our last train towards Port Vendres Ville, but when we got to the right area, the train stop didnt say the right title so we ended up missing our stop and going too far. That meant we had to buy ANOTHER train ticket and we were on the last train stop before Spain hahah... so two hours in a small train stop and a short train ride later we arrived at Port Vendres.

Port Vendres Tennis Club only has 3 courts! They are hard courts, but the surface is more similiar to the rubbed playground surface, like old tires molded together. It's much slower and more forgiving. The tourny is small, were the highest ranked players and are already in the money as were starting in the semifinals. The winner gets 300 euros!! yeahhhh, were pretty excited. We dont play until Wednesday, so were gunna start exploring the new area.