Our Way of Taking it Easy- Shem

So after a full needless 24 hours of traveling we made it to Anrtibes. It really shouldn't have taken that long but that's just how we roll. If there is a few words of advice for traveling and reserving tickets it's #1 that nothing is certain and #2 if youre trying to save money over time don't, its a loose loose situation and that's just ok.

Antibes is an small city on the Mediterranean with the old village (the original city) right on the sea and another old village of Biot in the mountains. Although extremely tired after we had an impressive 3 hours of sleep on the Marseille train station floor next to back packers and cigerette rolling and smoking bums we decided that we needed a little more adventure. So much adventure that I thought going barefoot might be a good idea to give my feet a break from shoes, STUPID!

We checked in to our B&B with Anu, great lady with lots of info. I took an hour nap while Andrea went for a swim in the pool. After she came back is where the walking started and it didn't stop for a long, long time.

We first went up to the old village of Biot, really cool little town. Apparently this town is known for its verriers (glass blowing) so we stopped in at a few of the galleries and took some really cool footage.There was aslo a festival going on for Sophia-Antipolis and there were more tourists there than we had expected. We walked around a bit and looked in a few stores and the most suprising thing was that no one said anything about me being barefoot all day, it was great. I had a pretty good story to tell people if they did though, I was going to say that I am traveling through Europe barefoot for three weeks to raise awareness of children around the world who don't have shoes. I never got to use it.

After taking way too many photos and being barefoot long enough we deiced to go to Carrefour (fact: 2nd largest retailer in the world to Walmart) because we had seen a sign down our street for it. This is where our awesome bad planning came into play. The sign just said Carrefour and the street to go down which was the intersection a few blocks away. We being naive thought that because there was a sign it must not be that far away and it was good marketing on their part because the sign did not say how many kilometers away it was, that should have been the first red flag.

Prior to going to Carrefour we thought it would be best to take it easy this day because we didn't get alot of sleep the night before and we were still exhausted. Needless to say we embarked on this unknown distance to to get a pair of slippers. We wanted to go specifically to Carrefour because there are these white plastic sandals that I had when I was in Tahiti and they were sold at Carrefour so I thought if any one would have them it would be Carrefour.

The roads were narrow as we walked, as all roads in Europe are and it was not easy walking barefoot, nor was it a short distance. As we passed bus stop after bus wanting to wait for the bus we just kept saying to ourselves, "It's got to be close, let's just keep going."

If it was not already ridiculous seeing these two tourists walk along what we found out later was a highway and seeing one of them barefoot but it became even more ridiculous when there was nowhere else on the highway to walk. As we came up to a bend on a hill literally equivalent to the LikeLike in Hawaii (it turned into a four lane highway) I told Andrea, "We've come way too far, to turn around right now" she reluctantly agreed. In my defense it was my idea to wait at 2 of the bus stops that we had already passed. So with nowhere else to go on the road we veered off onto a trail that went into the trees that seemed to follow along side the road.

By this time my feet were really hurting, how could I be so stupid, barefoot? Why are we walking in the forest right now? Why didn't we ask anyone how far this place was before just going? I'm allergic to poison oak, I wonder if there is poison oak in these woods? These were just a few questions I contemplated on our sojourn. I felt as if we were getting further and further below the road as our path was making a slight decent and the road was still inclining. With our path looking as though it would not join back with the road I suggested that we go through the brush to get back to the road. As we did so the vines had thorns on them that covered the ground and trees, we both got scrapped up pretty badly. I can't even imagine what the drivers who saw us coming out of those bushes might have been thinking.

By this time we had been walking well over two hours, what a waste. Andrea kept saying, "We're in one of the most beautiful places in the world and we are walking on a highway right now". We took the walk in the first place thinking that we might see some nice landscape and get some good photos, we didn't. We finally saw a car stopped on the highway and we asked how far Carrefour was from where we were and he assured us it was still aways away but that we were headed in the right direction.

After a total of 3 and a half hours of walking and passing 5 bus stops we made it and of course they didn't have the sandals we had gone there for, in fact they didn't have any kind of sandales. Luckily there was a little shoe store right outside where I bought a pair of slippers. Again no one said anything about my extremely dirty , by this time , barefeet.

We wised up after leaving Carrefour and waited at the bus stop, only to find out that that buses in Antibes and Biot stop running after 8:30. We caught the last bus to where we would have made the change to the bus that would have taken us home, which was about half way. This walk was much easier though because it was along the cost with no hills, there were sidewalks and I had slippers!

We left the house around 4 for Carrefour, got there around 7:30, caught the last bus at 8:30 and didn't get home until close to 11. This is our way of trying to take it easy. The walk was good though, it gave us some great time to talk and even kind of plan for our next adventure.