Maybe we should have taken the train back.  The ride out this way wasn’t bad.

We tried a day trip from Nice to nearby Antibes and Cannes.  Seemed easy enough with the bus terminal nearby and only a one euro fare per person.  Can’t get much simpler.  A couple nights ago we decided to scout out the bus station.  My phone maps suggested we were close…and sure enough that construction site full of dozers and dump trucks is right where Gare Routiere should be.  The buses still run, but from where?  A little research revealed that in January 2011 they started reconstruction on the site… not of a new central bus station but of a park.  Ok…more green space in a city already full of plazas and palm trees?  Where do the buses go?

The answer for transit organizers was to spread out the pickup points for Nice buses over a ten block radius.  How do you find your bus?  If you are lucky you might stumble across a shelter with a map outlining pickup points.  Luckier still, you might be at that pickup point without knowing it.  It only took us twenty minutes, along with some helpful locals to find where the 200 to Cannes leaves from.

Another option, if you aren’t hurried for time, is to stalk your bus.  Watch where it stops and walk up that way waiting for the next one in 15-20 minutes.  Just enough time to enjoy a warmed quiche…although an American guy in Paris once told us that “real men don’t eat quiche”.  Maybe he was more into the raw egg protein powder shake.

The bus to Antibes, not bad.  Scenic, warm, sunny, quiet…smelly.  To ensure the sensory experience was complete, it wasn’t the faint traces of salt in the sea air that had our noses lit up.  It was of course the fellow passengers on the bus taking advantage of the cheap transport to move them down the coast.  I have noted excessive cheap perfume as an offense worthy of some fine or punishment in previous blogs, but here I was almost praying for some young gal to enter the bus and grace us with her lack of olfactory self awareness.  It was just one guy that had an odor challenging that of your friendly cattle barn or pig farm.  For you city dwellers, imagine that one guy at the gym with odiferous pores, mix that with a pee-soaked alley, and add a pinch of shopping cart…or recycling depot.  The two guys with the second most odorous garments were even noting the rankness of this individual…which really has to be a signal.  The joys of public transit.

But it’s the cheap fare and great opportunity to meet different people that you ride the bus…right?  After a 90-minute pit stop in Antibes to grab a sandwich and stroll around the old town we grabbed the next bus to Cannes.  Lesson learned from the previous ride was to choose only seats near the front of the bus…anywhere!

Cannes was a nice little spot for a break.  Windy as hell, but sunny and still warm.  Two hours of wandering the beaches, checking out the castle for a few pics, and stopping to look at the local circus attractions was enough for us.  A 16:00 departure for the bus would put us back in around 17:30, just in time to grab a bite to eat and start in again on blog writing and picture editing.  20 minutes into the ride and it was fairly evident we weren’t going to make that time target without some shortcuts, and a city bus doesn’t make shortcuts.  It was rush hour, and in this part of the world there seems to be about two roads that run along the coast to connect the numerous pretty little towns, a highway and a milk run.

The milk run had it’s usual stop at the Cannes train station to pick up even more people on an already crowded bus.  This group that got on though ended up being ticket inspectors.  No problem, just have to rifle through the slips of paper in my pocket to find the right receipt and we’re good.  One pocket…two receipts from the previous two legs, a couple unstamped tram passes, some tissues and an old train ticket…just a second.  Next pocket…empty.  Third, fourth and fifth…also empty.  Accusations from my travelling partner that I carry around too much excess paper were not helping the matter at the moment.  A second inspector starts walking over, bus stopped the whole time with every passenger now training their eyes on us two foreigners not abiding by the rules, then Voila!  Melanie had it all along just in her coat pocket.

It was 90 minutes in, and we could see where we had to go.  That ferris wheel was noted in the distance across the bay, but with three more little seaside communities to navigate in a bus just big enough meant we were in for a long go of it.  No bathrooms on these buses.  no food or drink allowed.  We were already so dehydrated and beaten down from the ride, we could have been easily mistaken for locals.  We did finally arrive 18:30 making it an exhausting 2:30 from Cannes to Nice.  Tip:  Avoid long local bus trips around rush hour!

In case you’re wondering, it’s a 30euro fine for no valid bus ticket, double that up and we would be up to 60euro.  What I wonder is if that’s payable on the spot or your get hauled off to some French transit prison, or if they just handcuff you to the bus as punishment?  I might pick the former.