I spent the night before on the internet looking for train tickets to Aix. It looked like the only way to get tickets for under $300 was to leave the station before 9:00am. Since we were about 50 minutes from the station that serviced south France we would have to get up at 7 or so. We managed to do so and made our way to the train station. I learned in France you always go to the window to buy tickets. In Italy always use the machines and never go to the window unless you don’t have a machine. The reason you should go to the window in France is because what you see in the machine or on the internet isn’t always what the ticket agent sees. She got me a train at 10:00 that cost less then my super early train. Still it cost us $250 with our discount card to go to Provence. That was a lot because I still hadn’t gotten paid from the company I was working for. Three hours later we’re in the middle of what looks like a desert.. It obviously gets very hot and is very dry in Provence. It reminded me of Greece. The station that we arrived in is the Aix en Provence TGV station which happens to be 20 miles from the city. After finding an SNCF attendent that spoke english we learned that we need to take a bus to the city. The taxi was 25 euros and the bus was 15. Twenty minutes later we’re at a bus station that wasn’t on our map. We had hotel reservations but they were near the old train station. It was about a million degrees and the sun was shining. Jade learned a valuable lesson right away – when in Provence don’t touch metal. He’ll remember that for a while. Anyway we walked the right direction and ended up near the train station and our hotel. Funny that we stayed in a Comfort Inn in Europe. It had a pool and decent rooms. The only difference between the Provencal Comfort Inn and the Seattle one was about $100. We were hot and tired from the journey so we layed down and took a nap. Hunger awoke us so we ventured into town. Dinner appeared in the form of a Lebanese kebab which turned out to be quite good. Everywhere we go the Lebonese food is different. This kebab had an big round pita opened up in the middle. They put kebab meat (think vertical rotiserie like the Greeks), lettuce, onions and some sort of sauce. Then they rolled it back up and put it on the grill for a minute. They were pretty good and didn’t taste like any other Lebonese kabobs we’d eaten. We found an internet cafe and logged on to see if we had money yet and we did. Finally the waiting to do anything but survive was over. We returned to the hotel at Piper’s insistance and went night swimming in the pool. By the end of the night Jade could almost float. I was holding him up with one finger. He’d be an excellent swimmer if he could overcome his fear of water.