Where the White Things Are: Lettres Marseille

Always willing to sacrifice sleep for a good sunrise, I got up early in Marseille on Friday, February 14th, for a solo farewell to this quirky coastal city. It was an urban adventure-run up to the Hollywood-style les Lettres Marseille. The night before, I made a careful plan and broke down the segments of my adventure to get as accurate of a time estimate as possible. We had to check out of our Airbnb by 10am that morning, so I needed to be back from my run in time to shower, eat, and pack. I triple checked all of my travel segments until I was confident I would make it back in time. I offered to take any willing family members with me, but they all declined. Well, Jay and Rose said they would come if they were already awake when it was time to leave. Basically, they declined, haha. It was fine! I love a good solo run adventure!

Even though I was tempted to sleep in when my alarm went off at 6:30am, I knew that sleeping an extra hour wouldn't make a big enough dent in my jet-lagged tiredness to be worth skipping my morning adventure run! After a quick breakfast, I left our apartment and walked to the metro line that runs through the graffiti district of Marseille. Let me tell you, graffiti is eerie and menacing in the dark! While I was walking the 7 minutes from our Airbnb to the metro stop in the faint predawn light, the graffiti was like wild jumbled live shadows dancing on all of the buildings. I gathered my courage and power walked through it. I bought a two trip metro ticket at the machine with only a few mistakes, and I didn't get snapped by the ticket barrier. I got on the right line heading the right direction. I felt so savvy, even though it was the most simple metro station of all time. Marseille only has two metro lines, and they only cross twice. So simple.

I did have a bit of confusion coming out of the metro station at the end of the line, because there was a bunch of road construction with concrete barriers redirecting pedestrian traffic away from a big roundabout that I needed to cross. Google maps to the rescue! I found my straight shot road up the ridge, Rue de Lyon (which changed names two times en route to the summit: Rue Saint-Louis and Rue de la Viste). But it was all one road and was easy to follow even if it was uphill the whole way and the pigeons were lazy and aggressive at the same time: lazy until I was about to step on them, and then aggressively flying up in my face.

The sunrise was beautiful as I climbed the backbone of Marseille. The wind was blowing at a steady 16 mph, which made the 48 degree air feel MUCH colder. It blew mostly in my face the whole climb, and it was extra strong and cold at the Lettres. I scrambled all over the scrubby grass and clay-mud-dirt, freezing my hands while taking pictures and reveling in the feeling of having run up to this view on my own two feet. There's nothing quite like the meaningful satisfaction of getting to a destination on foot. It gives me ownership and understanding of the journey in a unique way. I stayed up at the Marseille sign for a bit longer than my estimated timeline allowed for. I knew I could run pretty fast down the hill to the metro station, so I lingered a bit longer.

At 8:26am, I pulled myself away and booked it back down the hill to the metro. Total run distance was 5.3 miles. On the way back to the metro, I was surprised to see two hairy pigs standing on the city sidewalk. When I approached them (at a quick run), they started trotting away from me down the sidewalk, haunches bouncing. Eventually they veered off to the side and I ran past. Apparently Marseille has a problem with wild pigs coming into town from the nearby national park! It was so unexpected and hilarious to see pigs wandering around a city! Seriously. Pigs. That was a new mid run animal interruption for me. While running, I have come in too-close-for-comfort contact with dogs, cats, chickens, roosters, snakes, deer, rabbits, rats, moles, voles, mice, marmots, beavers, cows, and horses, but never pigs until this run.

Marseille is such a delightfully quirky city. I love how it is pretty at times and junky at times, messy in some places and tidy in others. It has historic buildings mixed together with newer ones and jagged hilly streets as well as coastal sidewalks.

I rode the metro back to downtown Marseille like a pro and power walked back to our Airbnb to shower, eat, and pack. The graffiti looked way friendlier in the light of day.

This run was such a fun adventure! Riding the metro was necessary because I was not ready to run a full 12+ miles round trip to see the Marseille sign. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of mapping a route and following it, and I always love running to a good view! It's a little silly how pleased with myself I felt when I used the public transportation to help me get within running distance of my destination. It is just such a novelty to my small town self, having public transit at all, and being able to use it for adventures is so much fun!

The Lettres Marseille sign is way off the beaten track in Marseille. I got to run through the least touristy of everyday messy jumbled streets to get there. It is always nice to see the less glamorous side of a place as a tourist, so I enjoyed dodging several short old French men in their ubiquitous cloth caps and career women waiting at bus stops and shop owners opening their boulangeries.

Here's an embarrassing/hilarious/awkward admission: I have a hard time telling elderly French men apart! They all seem to walk with the same slow purposeful prowl, they all dress in dark wool coats with a newsboy cap or similar, their hair is all the same shade of iron gray, they are all the same diminutive height (5'7''-ish) and even their voices sound the same! And they are often smoking. I had a few moments during this run where I did a double take and second guessed my sense of direction when I passed yet another old French man who looked similar enough to the other old French men I had passed to make me wonder how that old guy got ahead of me, or if I was going in circles! Thank goodness the road was all uphill on the way out and all downhill on the way back, or else I might have actually tried turning around! Haha.

My careful planning worked out beautifully. I ended up leaving 5 minutes late and arriving back to the Airbnb at 9:12am, so the outing only took 7 minutes longer than I estimated! Woot!

Here's a screen shot of my very detailed adventure plan. I know myself, and I tend to ignore the clock when I am out adventuring, so I had to do all of this number and timetable crunching beforehand in order to make sure I could enjoy the journey without wondering if I'd miss the train later.

Graffiti starting to get eerie...I was too creeped out to take pictures of the creepiest graffiti on this dark morning walk.

My metro, right on time.

Sunrise!

Pigeons flapping in my face. Do locals wince and dodge when the pigeons suddenly take off? Is there a good way to handle it? Pigeons are gross and not scared of people enough for me to actually trust that they won't hit me in the face while I'm running. So, I winced and dodged.

Sunrise was behind me, so I had to pause and turn around to admire it mid-run. The road I ran up had this nifty rustic wall along it--it really felt like the backbone of Marseille.