What a day! First, Marty and Scott took a long walk to the grocery store

Then it was time for Villefranche’s annual “crazy parade with dancing ladies followed by throwing flowers from boats” festival (we’re still not exactly sure what they were celebrating – but it was FUN!!!).

Marty did some research: The event is called “Naval battle of Flowers” and it was suppose to take place on the day when we were just landing in Nice, but it was postponed to today due to the bad weather on Monday. Seems the origin of this event has something to do with seamen, flowers and women. Probably similar to how our rose festival and naval ships got started.

We sat at a sidewalk cafe for the parade, then stood by the water and caught flowers with all of the locals. Surreal but such a good time…

After that we took the train to Monaco to see the palace, the yachts and the casino where we lost some euros and saw lots of expensive cars!

We woke to overcast sky’s but no rain.  Went to “breakfast” at a little spot right on the bay with a great view.  Then we were off to catch a bus into Nice for Carnival.  We got into town about 2 pm and after plenty of walking around Nice we found our way to carnival.  It was fun.  Lots of floats and people with large masks on along with music and dancing.  We watched for a couple of hours and then decided we needed to sit down and eat and drink.  The weather had cleared up and there were some sun breaks so we found an outside table and drink wine and ate. It was Nice.  We all still needed to catch up from the traveling.  Got back to the place and all went right to bed.  The coolest thing about the parade was this mechanical dragon.  It was amazing … See below ..

The flight over to Europe is miserable ( isn’t miserable a French word … I think there’s a movie also). The realization is starting to set in that we have to do that again. We get off the plane in Nice and its like we never left Oregon … 45 degrees on raining … I mean it was really coming down. We … not remembering that its raining decide that we would walk take the “10 minute” walk to the train station to catch the train to Nice. We were really wet by the time we got to the train station.. We couldn’t figure how to get tickets so we just boarded and hope we wouldn’t get arrested ur something .. We just wanted to get to our rented place and sleep. We finally got to the town where we are staying and the place is really Nice. We checked in with Donna the person bunny arranged the rental with and dropped our bags and went foraging for food. After sizing up several of the restaurants we decide on sandwiches from the boulangerie and drinks from the market and back to the place. We were starving and really hadn’t slept for 24 hours.
This town looks spectacular. It reminds me a little like Santa Barbara. Can’t wait to get out and explore this town.
Here we go !!!
Marty

We have arrived! And, yes, that is rain (and Scott) on the medieval path just outside our medieval apartment. But the forecast is for a little more rain Tuesday morning and then sun, sun, sun…. (Crossing fingers!)

We had a looong, interesting journey yesterday, including – once we arrived in Nice – a felonious ride on the train to villefranche. There were no humans selling tickets and the ticket machines did not appear to accept either cash or credit cards. We asked in our “best” French (translation: butchered and choppy) for help and finally an official-looking man just waved us on. That was fine until three transit police boarded as we were getting off at villefranche. We did NOT try to explain our plight (images of the French Connection and Midnight Express and Shawshank Redemption crowded our jet lagged minds). We just took our felonious selves and scooted off to our cozy flat.

We walked around town a bit, ate and hit the hay early..

The adventure has begun! We are currently waiting at PDX for our flight to Salt Lake City (where we’ll connect to Paris and then to Nice). The rest of the trip goes as follows: five nights in Villefranche-sur-mer (France), seven nights in Tuscany/Umbria/Florence and then five nights in Rome. It’s amazing to rattle that off in one sentence when it took, like, five weeks full time to plan it all…

But now we’ve begun and we can relax and just enjoy the ride! Our good buddy Greta drove us to the airport (thanks, sweetie!) and we are all in a good mood, looking forward to seeing OLD stuff, eating good food and drinking chianti and – best of all – meeting a ton of interesting people.

Check out this photo of us at pdx – wait, who the hell is that? Ben???