Posted by Harry.
Being broke college kids who don’t necessarily want to spend money on public transportation (excluding trains, because they’re kind of a necessity), we’ve all probably done a fair amount of walking around wherever we’ve been visiting. I’d say on average; we probably log a solid 10 miles (?) a day on the weekends. Usually a lot of walking is done in cities because, hey, it takes time to get from place to place. This past weekend however, instead of walking around in a city or cities, I took a little hike from one city to another. Notably, this route was a part of the GR 98-51 trail that connects Cassis to Marseilles through a beautiful mountain range known as “The Calanques.”
According to my pal Morgan, she said this hike was an estimated 17 miles looking at the map. The people that I was with and I were like “Aight, that’s totally chill! We can just make it in a day,” and we planned to do the hike from early Friday morning to Friday evening. Unfortunately, the weather was forecasted to be raining and thunder storming throughout Friday, so we were a little bummed. Fortunately, the weather in actuality was perfect and sunny so we got to go on our way.
The trail we took isn’t just for the hardcore hikers who want to walk 17 miles from city to city, but had many trails of varying length for any skill level in between. The most famous trail is the one that leads to the Cave-En-Vau, which is this beautiful inlet beach you see above. That was only about 1.5 miles in, so if you have the time, check it out! It’s definitely got a spot on my “Places to re-visit when I’m older” list.
Along the way, we ended up climbing up a big mountain and caught some gorgeous views of the Calanques as a whole. Near the end, we got to hike into a stunning view of the sunset. Aside: probably the funniest-yet-disheartening part of the hike was when we checked our GPS as it said 2.1 miles until the restaurant where we weregoing to grab dinner at, hiked 30 minutes in the correct direction of the restaurant, and then it said 2.3 miles until our destination (LOL).
When we finally got to the restaurant, never has a moment that was happier than to sit down and get off our feet for a while. We all made bets on how many miles we actually hiked, since it felt much longer than 17…and it ended up being around 23-24 miles! A huge sense of accomplishment fell over our group as we devoured our delicious food (food tastes better after hiking 24 miles) and then Uber-ed (not walked) our way to the taxi because hey, I thought it was well deserved. If there was a shirt that said “I conquered the Calanques,” I totally would have bought one. All in all, it was great experience and I would recommend for those of you who are outdoorsy and/or adventurous to check it out.