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Clare
Clare

Day 3: Sète

When we woke up in Montpellier on Monday morning, we were pleased to see that the sky looked a lot brighter than the day before.

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The plan for our final day was to visit the seaside town of Sète, so after breakfast we set off down the palmtree-lined road to the train station.

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Sète is located on the Mediterranean coast, only about 15 minutes away from Montpellier on the local train. If you look at Sète on the map, you'll see that it is in an unusual location, on a thin strip of land between the sea and a saltwater lagoon. The town centre itself is also criss-crossed by a number of canals so you are never far away from water, as we found when we stepped out of the train station.

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We didn't have a map of Sète but we knew it was only a small town, so we decided just to stroll around and see what we could find.

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We quickly realised that Sète is a really colourful town; all the canals are lined with brightly coloured buildings.

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Behind the town is a small hill called Mont St Clair.

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While we were admiring the hill, we caught sight of the tower of the town's main church, which is set a little way uphill, above the canals.

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We decided to walk towards it...

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..arriving there just on time to hear the clock strike for midday.

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Midday meant it was time to start looking for somewhere to have lunch. One of the canalsides was lined with restaurants and looked very promising indeed.

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Unfortunately, once we took a closer look at the menus though, we realised that Sète's location means it specialises in fish. Every restaurants seemed to be advertising a different type of fresh fish on its lunch menu. Mussels, prawns, things we'd never heard of; it all sounded disgusting! I was relieved when in the end we managed to find an Italian restaurant, which was serving fish-free pizza. I had a margherita, which somewhat unusually came with ham. It was tasty though, and it was warm enough to sit outside in the sun :)

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After lunch we walked to the town's main square.

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Continuing the fish theme, it featured a rather unusual statue of an octopus.

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We climbed a very hilly street...

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... found another church...

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...and strolled along some more canals.

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In the mid-afternoon it was time to say goodbye to Sète and head back to Montpellier.

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The hotel had kindly been looking after our backpacks for us, so we went to retrieve those and then had a final stroll around the city centre.

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We revisited some of our favourite sights from Saturday...

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...and then walked in the direction of the bus stop where we would need to catch a bus back to the airport in the evening. We had decided it made sense to find somewhere to get dinner not too far from there.

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We weren't starving after our pizzas earlier in the day in Sète, but we were feeling a bit peckish. In the end we found a nice restaurant by the river where we were able to share some tapas and some wine.

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Up until this point, it had been a very relaxing day. Then we got to the airport and found our flight had been delayed. At first, for an unspecified amount of time, which ultimately turned out to be 3 hours and 40 minutes. That wouldn't be good at the best of times, but it's especially not good when the flight was a late one in the first place (scheduled to leave at 22.00).

After what seemed like forever waiting in the airport, we eventually took off at 01.45. The airport staff had said that the delay was something to do with the weather, but the pilot explained that there had been a technical difficulty with the original plane, which meant we had had to be allocated a different plane and a crew called out from standby. It was 02.30 by the time we landed in Gatwick, it took about 45 minutes to get out of the airport and retrieve the car, and so by the time we finally pulled into our own driveway, it was 05.45 on Tuesday.

That's definitely the latest we've ever got home from a weekend away! But it could have been worse - at least we didn't miss the flight this time :) And it was still a really enjoyable weekend in France.

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