We’ve all been pretty tired the past few days. Travel is exhausting – even when all you’re really doing is looking at stuff and eating and drinking (which is 90% of what we’ve been doing). Still it’s exhausting cuz you’re doing all of that while navigating a foreign language, customs, traffic, etc.

But despite the exhaustion, it’s fun and rewarding. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

Scott visited his friend Arthur in Montpellier. He had a great time but he’ll have to expand on that…

Marty and I drove around the hoity toity areas of the French Riviera – St Jean Cap Ferrat and St Tropez. And drank more wine in villefranche.

Today it was time to leave France. Marty drove valiantly among the crazy Italians. Truly it’s miraculous that there aren’t more accidents. At one point there was a dog loose on the freeway (the 100+ mph autostrade). It was bizarre! Traffic was stopped and people were out of their cars trying to corral this poor frightened animal. (Italians are crazy but very kind!)

We stopped in Pisa briefly. Bunny took this selfie accidentally.

Then we found the Griffy bar and had to stop!

Made it to Montepulciano by 8ish. More on that tomorrow…

Scott took off this morn at 9am to catch a train to Montpelier to see his friend Arthur.  Arthur is someone who was a foreign exchange student who stayed with Scotts good friend Chauncey about 3  yes ago.  Bunny and I offered to drive him but he wanted to experience France on his own.  He stayed over night and we expect him back by 7 pm on day 5. 
Today was pick up the car day.  We took the bus into town and got to the rental agency by 11 am.  Once we got the car we wanted to get out of Nice (the big city) as fast as we could.  I wanted to get to the countryside to practice my driving without a lot of traffic.  We spent the day in Antibes having lunch and walking around town.  It is right on the BEAUTIFUL Mediterranean sea.  We got back at 5 pm and spent the rest of the evening drinking wine by the sea.  Nice day …marty

The view from the table …

We could not travel to Europe without Ben. He’s working hard on his doctorate (as much as one can “work hard” in Santa Barbara :). So we brought the next best thing: Flat Benjamin. Here he is sharing a glass of rose with us in our villefranche flat…

on to our travels: We’ve had another lovely day here on the French Riviera. Scott headed out to Montpellier to visit a friend while Marty and I picked up the rental car. (Just one comment here: these people drive like maniacs!!!)

Marty and I then visited Antibes, checked out the Picasso museum (je ne comprends pas!), wandered around and headed back to villefranche.

Here’s a view of Marty the tourist walking the medieval walls around Antibes.

Back to villefranche, drinks on the bay, back to our cozy flat. Bon soir!

Scott and I are now on the same sleeping pattern.  Early to bed and early to rise.  What’s really weird is that we are going to bed before bunny which I don’t think has ever happened before this trip.  Anyway it was 6 am and scott asks me if I want to go for a walk.  I had been looking at the map already for the nearest large grocery store for provisions that the local market doesn’t carry.  So I suggested we just go to the nearest Carrefore (the French Fred Meyers).  They open at 8:30 and its about a 50 minute walk.  So we get ready to and leave at 7:30.  We are following the direction from Google maps on my tablet.  We get about 15 mins into our journey and I am now realizing that what was not showing up on Google maps was the terrain.  We are proceeding to c!imb the steep hill behind where we are staying and then going down the other side.  So while the distance to the store was only 1.4 miles it was also about a 1500 ft elevation gain and then down the other side.  We did finally get to the Carrefour and get our groceries.  It was great exercise and we got to see a lot of the town.  The views from the top are spectacular.  We took the bus home.

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???