The scuba world is a fun place for a lot of reasons. Setting aside the wonder of the underwater world for the moment, there are the great people that you meet while diving. Yesterday, my husband had a guy on the boat who is currently from Boston, but originally from a small town near Nice, France. Nice is an incredible city which is why I included a chapter about it in Irises to Ashes, but that also is not the point to this post. Hubby and the guy were talking about the Azure Coast and hubby mentioned us spending one night in Sete, and the guy was excited that we even knew where it was, much less had been there.
When hubby recounted the story, memories flood back. Sete is a small fishing village that we went to en route to Normandy, en route to Frankfurt the last summer we were in Italy. I found it in the guidebook almost by happenstance and it was a logical stopping point for our first day of travel. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/the-perfect-break/8342532/Sete-France-the-perfect-break.html) As it says in the article you can click to, a large part of Sete’s charm is because it isn’t a tourist destination. The seafood is plentiful and literally comes to the restaurants steps away from the docks. We stayed near the center of town, close to the water and strolled the streets for a couple of hours before it grew dark, then picked from several restaurants, any of which I’m sure would have been just as good. Canals run through the village to make it a “small Venice” and we lingered in another waterfront café to enjoy coffee and a cognac – or perhaps it was another glass of wine – I don’t completely recall. I awakened early the next morning as I so often do and meandered back onto the streets watching the village come into day. I found the place for us to have breakfast and went back to fetch Hubby. We had six-plus hours driving ahead of us and didn’t linger, yet it was a pleasant interlude – croissants and café au lait at an outdoor table along a canal as gulls shrieked and swooped. If you are ever in the South of France and want an off-the-mainstream village, then Sete is the place.
