Via Aurelia day 9: interim finish!

Le Muy to Fréjus, 28.3 km

The valley ahead is congested with the A8 autoroute – the main road connection between Marseilles, Nice etc and through to Genoa and the coast of Italy – as well as the TGV trainline and the RN7, the non autoroute main road. On the map, therefore, the day’s stage bobbed and wove to avoid this transportation chaos. I crossed over or under the A8 four times during the day. The first section, however, took a scenic detour, passing behind the Rocher de Roquebrune on one of the hiking trails on this popular geographic feature. Most hikers would feel that they’d earned their beer after such a hike, but I had another 20 km to go. I was glad that this section was at the start of the day.

The rest of the day was a bit of a let down after such a spectacular start. The scenery was pleasant, but lots of traffic and road building,  development of both commercial and residential areas. Being so close to the ocean I guess this is inevitable. Fréjus, my destination for the day, was in Roman times an extremely important town. As a port it was second in importance only to Ostia (near  Rome) and was at different times a regional capital. It has lots of Roman relics, but most people come to this area for the ocean. Old Fréjus is now quite some distance from the ocean, so the waterfront part of Fréjus has effectively merged with Saint Raphael.

This marks the end of this walking segment. Originally I had planned to walk to the bext town, La Napoule (another 32 km) then catch a late afternoon train to Marseilles. However, given the impact of being less than 100% for a few days, I’m going to have a more relaxing day by walking the 2 km to the train station in Saint Raphael instead. In 9 days I’ve covered 207 km on foot, and about 40 by other means of transport. That’s about one third of the distance to link Arles to the via Francigena in Sarzana, Italy. In total I’ve done 44 consecutive days covering 1,108 km (not counting the bus bits😃). Time to relax for a few days! Thanks for following along in my journey.