Montpellier - the cycling continues by train

After three attempts taking our bikes on the train, we finally are pros! We figured out that there is a bike symbol on the door of the cart that has bike access which makes it a lot easier to find the door rather than walking the length of the train looking for the bike racks. This time we didn't even need help putting them up. We bought some much need Haribo for our hour train ride and we were underway. Once we got into Montpellier we headed to the tourism office for map to our hotel. We booked a hotel 3km outside of town because we figured that was a short walk or just a quick bike ride into the city. The city doesn't have the best bike paths, but we got a bike map and mapped out a route to our hotel. There was one tricky intersection which seemed to be our biggest problem. Of course we made the wrong turn and our "short" bike ride to the hotel turned into a 2 hour ride around the city. It wouldn't have been to bad if I wasn't carrying a hiking pack stuffed with our clothes and cosmetics  At one point we ended up on the tram line and Leslie's bike got stuck in the rail line and she feel over. Unfortunately, I missed this one and didn't get any pictures of her on the ground. We finally found our way across the river and onto a highway that led to our hotel. Biking on highways in illegal in France for obvious reasons. When we finally realized we were on a highway we quickly took an exit ramp which luckily lead us straight to our hotel. After 2 hours of biking around, we checked into our hotel which looked just like the inside of a boat. We decided to bike back into the downtown area and check out the historic sites. Turns out, it is only a 15 minutes bike ride into the city and we figured out where we went wrong the first time. We were much closer than we had thought! We biked around for a bit then ran into another obstacle: a giant hill, I would compare it to the hill in San Francisco. We aren't pro bikers yet, so we walked them up the hill. We parked them outside the giant marketplace and got some food at a boulangerie and walked around the city. Montpellier reminds me a lot of Nice. It is much bigger than Avignon and it doesn't have the dirty feel of Marseille. We went back to the hotel before dinner to locked up our bikes and ventured back into the city for dinner. By the time we found a restaurant it was 9pm and we waited another hour for our food. We were famished by the time our food came out and we definitely cleared our plates. It turned into a 2 hour dinner, so typical French but I love it. I actually enjoyed my dinner and the conversation. The next day we biked to a giant mall and went shopping. We tried so hard to avoid H&M, but we ended up there. I needed some new black skinny jeans because all of my jeans have conveniently stretched out since being here. After a day of shopping, we biked back to the hotel and walked into town for a night-time picture tour of the city. We saw more beautiful buildings which looked even more beautiful in the moon light. It rained on Sunday which was okay since we were leaving that day. We bought more Haribo (obviously) and took the train back to Avignon. Even though we were only gone for 2 days, it felt good when we got back "home".