Europe Day 12 of 59, Èze to Nice

This morning it was time to leave the Medieval hilltop village and head into civilization. But before we do, it is time for me to break my self-imposed rule a second time. You see, I realized that yesterday's Picasso pic was the first on the blog that I didn't take. So...

I have no choice but to share this image from wikipedia of Èze. Obviously taken from a vantage point I was never going to have, it shows you exactly where we are. I know you don't care, but I feel rather dirty now that I've used someone else's pic. The kind of dirt you can't wash off.

Here's the road out of Èze. This is your classic hands halfway out the window, grasping the iPhone like it was a living being sort of picture. But you have to love when a tunnel is so rawly dynamited out of rock

Then I turned around and got this shot. Barbie suggested I write on it, and thanks to my friend Albert who told me about pixlr.com, the browser based photoshoppy program, I was able to do an amusingly childish job at pointing out the important sights in this pic. Namely, where we had been.

When we got to Nice, I was still obviously in out-the-window mode.

A lot of people criticize Nice for being uglier and more modern than much of France, and it is. But going through town spotting apartment buildings like this one, I felt it has a certain charm nonetheless. I mean, compare this to apartment buildings in America and tell me what's ugly.

Our hotel is located on the Promenade des Anglais, a major street running along the beach that calls to mind Miami, Santa Monica, and every other beach city you can recall. Thinking about it, how many ways are there to do a main street along the beach?

Palm trees. Sand. Cars. If I told you this was taken in Florida, you know you'd buy it. But that water is the Mediterranean.

What more can you ask for from the French Riviera than an elderly man in a speedo?

The boardwalk of the Promenade des Anglais. Our hotel, the Negresco, is the minaret yuo see in the background.

Those last few pictures were taken because when we got to our hotel, they not only told us that our room wasn't ready but they seem to express that we were rude to even walk into the lobby before 3pm. Barbie dropped her card, and by the time we came back our bottoms were kissed and we were told, "You received-eh a double-eh upgrade-eh." That business card of hers is fierce.

The hallway has funky carpet and modern art on the walls. The theme of our floor. But the room...

The room is not modern, it's classical European. You walk through the door and see this hallway. That glass on the left is the bathroom, with gold colored sinks and tub. (Colored, not made of.)

The hallway opens to that little area...

Which opens to the bed area... and that's the room. No bathroom pics for you!

Barbie felt that we should share what we mean when we say, "travel light." These are Barbie's three bags.

Here are my three bags. Note each of us has a backpack you wear like a pack mule, a backpack that rolls with wheels, and an extra bag than can be shouldered or rested on the wheeled backpack. That's it for 59 days. And, seriously, we both think we could have packed even less.

The hotel's elevator is funky and picture worthy, no? You cqan see my scruffy beard. Need to trim it and my head tomorrow.

We went looking for a good dinner.

After checking with many professional chefs and the hotel's concierge, we decided to eat at Nice's finest Irish restaurant.

We walked down the Promenade...

Enjoyed the setting sun...

And had dinner.

Tomorrow we begin the cruise. Expect fewer pics and potential delays in blog posting from the cruise. I'm not sure how good the internet is going to be on the water.

Europe Day 11 of 59, Èze

Day eleven began like all the rest. Me on my laptop updating this blog while Barbie sleeps, my having gone to sleep 4 to 6 hours earlier than she as that's when she's working. We both need to straighten our schedules when we get on the yacht cruise in two days. I mean, they're going to hit us with set meal times. Yikes.

Here is the front door of our little Medieval villa. Just like home.

Do these walkway pictures get old? I didn't think so.

We lunched at Chateau de la Chèvre d'Or, the hotel just down the hill from us.

Needless to say, we were impressed with the hotel.

The plates themselves feature the Chèvre d'Or. How cute is that?

This kitty visited us during lunch. He said, "Why haven't you taken any pics of your food? The presentation is brilliant." He was right. I kept forgetting.

But with the cat's help I remember to take this pic of dessert.

The same plate minutes later.

After lunch we were taken on a tour of the hotel, one of the bonuses to travelling with Barbie.

This pool is just for show. They float candles on it at night for atmosphere.

This view is awful familiar, but always worth a look.

There is their golden goat statue. I love a unique theme like this one. Apparently it goes back many, many years when a man saw a golden goat that told him to build a hotel. Or something like that.

One of their rooms. Looks comfortable, no?

This is the pool for guests. If the other pictures didn't make you want to be a millionaire, I assume this one will.

The bedroom of a suite, in a very different style than the earlier contemporary one. Every room is unique and named after an artist. I should lie and say this is the Picasso suite. But it isn't. And lying is wrong.

The living room of the same suite. Oh my.

The plaque at the hotel's entrance. Honestly, it is one of the finest hotels I have ever seen. And I have seen far too many. It is up there with Villa d'Este in Lake Como. Which is saying a lot.

Back in our room, I felt like it was finally time to show you our downstairs area. After changing for the heat, we headed up to the very top of the hill. There one finds an "exotic garden" and the remains of the oldest fortifications on the hill, built in the 1100's.

A pregnant statue. Lovely, yes? For all the pregnant ladies back home.

Walls from the 1100's. The pic doesn't capture how high up we are.

Barbie and ruins. Don't worry. Pics with perspective are coming soon.

Our roof is there, on the left, closer to the camera. It's the tile one. Red tile. See it?

That wall on the left is the one that was behind Barbie earlier. Told ya there'd be some perspective coming.

In case you didn't understand, allow me to help. "I was just standing right there." Oh, almost forgot. Hilarious hilltop moment. We learned today that many tour buses stop in during the day, which, yes, means overweight Americans. While taking pictures, I heard a terribly loud fart. I turned in the direction of the fart and saw a woman sidestep two steps away from her husband. Then they both laughed a little. Had I gotten it on video I suspect it would have broken a million hits on youtube.

Enough time on top of the hill, time to walk down to the bottom. This entire Medieval village is two hotels with a few restaurants, shops and art galleries.

How eerily real does this mannequin look? Barbie's camera has a pic of me reaching for her bottom.

At the main road, Barbie decides to get to Monaco somehow. The French put the accent on the a, as in, "mone-AH-co." I correct every one of them every time.

You wanted perspective? How about this one? Can you imagine being a guy with a sword and shield thinking, "The king wants us to storm that? It's on top of the dang hill, man!"

I neglected to say that yesterday our check-in did not go as we expected. I'll not go on about each of the problems, suffice to say that Barbie sent an email to the VP of sales for the hotel.

This is what happened in reaction to said email. Not bad, eh?

We got dinner at the bottom of the hill, at a restaurant called, "Pinocchio's." Their menu (no pic) featured Disney's character on the front. The odds that they pay royalties? Though that does allow me to mention that apparently a young and recently successful Walk Disney came to Èze when it was still, well, rather Medieval and was instrumental in encouraging the residents into making it into what it is. In fact, with his input it became a favorite destination for golden age Hollywood.

Time to head back to our villa.

And here we are. Our steps at night. Symmetry.

Europe Day 10 of 59, Avignon to Èze

I was dreaming last night. In this dream, some guy had tickets to a basketball game to be played in the Coliseum of Rome. I was annoyed that he was too lazy to get on that train, but then I got him to go and soon we were there. Then I awoke at 5am to see Barbie tuning into the Laker game that was being played live on another continent. I watched the Lakers finally lose at 6am, a bit annoyed with them but not heartbroken. (What can say when your hometown team makes a lot of mistakes, including missing many free throws, and their opponent makes the highest percentage of shots in NBA Finals history, and your team still nearly wins at the end? You say that they are likely to win the championship.)

The reason I bothered with all that was to inform you that, hey, I didn't go back to sleep. As the kids say, "Dang it." I waited for Barbie to wake up and then we headed to the train station with, randomly, the same taxi driver who picked us up at the train station days earlier. I almost got a pic of him answering his iPhone on the drive, as it was cool to see the caller ID appear on his dash and all that bluetooth coolness that in the USA is reserved for luxury cars.

There she is, the TGV to take us away. If I had bothered to bring a full-feature camera, then I might have bothered to try to stand still enough to leave the aperture open and catch this sucker zipping into the station as a blur. But then I'd be not traveling as lightly as possible for 59 days. I cannot tell you how great it feels to step out of a hotel room and know that you have everything you need in three small bags.

Barbie again slept on the train ride, so I whipped out my special edition Newsweek that I never read from January all about the Obama inauguration. Lots of history in there, which I like.

It is obligatory, when the sea becomes visible from the train, to take a picture.

It is not obligatory to take a picture from the train of graffiti, but I often do when stopped in a station.

We switched trains in Nice. This is the Nice train station. Pronounce "Nice" like it's English and suddenly you have a Mister Rogers moment; "This is the nice train station. With nice tracks. And a nice train." But this wasn't "nice," it was, "Neese."

We got off the train and we were soon in the back of a car headed up a hill.

We headed up the hill, not towards the ocean. Good pics of Èze village will have to wait until tomorrow. I couldn't get them from the car. But it is a tiny village on top of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. Our car dropped us off at an office where we gave them our bags and then we had to walk up the hill for ten minutes, on a fairly steep path.

I did take a picture of the valet parking area of our hotel. This pic suggests that those staying here are not impoverished.

Here's a moment along the path to the hotel. You get the idea this place is not new.

Sorry, I was too exhausted to take pictures until they sat us down for lunch. I should have gotten very close to this "welcome drink" that was fizzy and sweet and strong with liquor, but you should be able to see the naked woman stem if you click on it.

The view from our lunch table. Beautiful place, though when you are from California you are reminded of home when you see this.

This woman sat with me at lunch. Then came with me to my room. I will try to get her name later. By the way, here is where we had our first rude French restaurant experience of the trip. Not in the big city Paris, or the medieval town Avignon, but at the luxury hotel overlooking the Mediterranean where they are supposed to bend over backwards with brilliant service. Go figure.

We got a little two level hotel room. Here you see the bed, stairs on the right.

Here you see the stairs, bed on the right.

Here you see the view from the room. Yes, the same view from lunch. Not long after taking this pic, I had a video chat with to my brother and his kids on Skype, and then I went to sleep for 13 hours. I woke up and got to the blog just now. And now you know why I bothered telling about the lack of sleep the night before.

The only pic I took of our downstairs area is this. Note the theme? Picasso is truly the theme of this trip. I forgot to mention him in Avignon, but it was once again one of Pablo's stomping grounds.

For fun I include Picasso's, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon)," 1907. Yes, this should have been included when we were in Avignon, not leaving it. These are prostitutes in Barcelona, not Avignon, but they "of Avignon," and we'll be in Barcelona so, which means you can expect more Picasso references in two weeks. You see, the entirely unintended Picasso theme of this trip is stronger than ever.