Hike-Bus Mont Saint-Clair

Some time ago, we did a homegrown bus tour of the mountain peak of Sète, Mont Saint-Clair (see here). That time was all by public bus, hopping on and off.

Today, we hiked part of it! We caught a bus into centre-ville, where I got a few grocery items that were not available at my usual store, then to Epi d'Or for a sandwich. From there, we zig-zagged the city streets up through the quartier haut (the "high neighborhood," and yes, it was steep going!). We eventually followed the bus route for two reasons: (1) it's one of a very few routes to completely cross the center of the island, and (2) if we just couldn't hike as much as we planned, we could catch the bus for some of the route ;-)

It was steep and sunny (so hot!), with a little breeze, and we got to the Chapelle at the top! We looked around for a shady spot to sit...

Eventually, we opted for sitting on some stairs in the courtyard :-\  But we also found a water spigot, and refilled our bottles with really very sweet water!

After our oh-so-elegant lunch*, we went into the salon, where an artist had a showing

We checked the bus time, and found we had about half an hour to wait. So, we decided to kill a little time walking​ on to the next stop. It was short, but steeply down (downhill is not so good for the knees), so we probably won't do that next time. We even saw a sign warning drivers that one side road had a 20% grade! Here's a different side road where we waited for the bus

Well, so we got our downhill bus, then walked the rest of the way home - all told, we had a jaunt of just over 2 hours.

Next time? Earlier (cooler). Walk up through the forest (shade). Bus from peak to town/home. Lunch and wine in town. Maybe ice cream...

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* there is a small restaurant right at the Chapelle parking lot - sandwiches, ice cream, crêpes, etc. (It has shade...) But we brought ours this time.