Ikea & Mont Faron

As the dedicated readers (if there are any?) of my blog may have noticed, we have been redoing our office for a bit. So naturally, refurbishment calls for new furniture, which inevitably means a visit to IKEA. Unfortunately (or, rather, thankfully), Ikea is quite far away in our case, over an hour’s drive away, in Toulon, so we don’t go there very often.

That does mean, though, that we tend to go a bit overboard with the shopping – Ikea just does that to you, doesn’t it? So, instead of the bookshelf we were mainly after, we left with a bathroom cupboard, a table for our balcony, some new shelves and drawers for our shelf downstairs, and plenty of other stuff. In fact, in the end, the bookshelf we were meant to buy in the 1st place didn’t fit… Oh, well ;-)

After the obligatory meatballs in the cafeteria, followed by the Daim cake that’s no longer called Daim cake, we decided to make our way over to nearby Mont Faron. We figured we might as well take advantage of the great weather and do a bit of hiking? We had a bit of trouble finding the road up to the mountain (might seem hard to believe, given that the hulk of a mountain overlooking Toulon is pretty hard to miss), but eventually made it. It was quite a scary road as well, definitely not for the faint-hearted. But we did make it, finally.

Mont Faron is, as I said, quite an imposing little mountain, towering up to 584 meters. The views from the top are stunning, with views over Toulon, and the surrounding beautiful scenery. As planned, we embarked upon the sentier des cretes, a nice walk, but disappointingly short (nothing like the 1 ½ hours our guidebook was talking about). Still, the views were well worth it!

There’s a fair bit of history associated with Mont Faron, mostly of the military kind. It was at Toulon where the liberation of Sout-eastern France started at the end of World War II, and there is a museum here that commemorates that. Plenty of interesting military fortifications to check out, as well…

The rest of the weekend was spent assembling Ikea furniture, oh bliss… ;-)