Rhonda Bracey: At Random

What a lovely place! The dock is about a street away from the town centre, there’s a beach right in town (yep, we went swimming and yes, it was reasonably cold, but very refreshing), it has good shopping and a very long pedestrian-only street full of delightful small shops, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of tourists except those of us from the ship. Ajaccio was the birthplace of Napoleon, but we didn’t feel the need to visit the historic places that celebrated him.

You know how some places just speak to you and you say in your head ‘I could live here’? Well, Ajaccio was one of those places for me. After the high levels of glitz and glamour seen in St Tropez and Monte Carlo, it was refreshing to come to a place that wasn’t so focused on wealth or tourism.

After wandering about town for most of the morning, we walked back to the ship for a relaxing afternoon by the pool.

The journey from Barcelona so far

Ajaccio city centre is on the right, the town beach is on the other side of those buildings

One lone figure in the Mediterranean at the town beach. There were more, and we added another two, but it certainly wasn’t crowded even though it was another hot day. The water was refreshingly cold!

Freshly squeezed orange juice is everywhere in the southern/western Mediterranean and it’s DELICIOUS. This large glass cost EU5 in a cafe right near the beach

A GORGEOUS yellow Vespa! (yellow wasp)

The very long pedestrian-only area, which had hundreds of small shops and cafes