It was high time for a holiday again! Actually, the quasi-plan for this one was hatched back in the fall when a song came on iTunes and I looked at Kirk and said “I want to go to France! I want to go to France in May! I want to sit at a cafe in France, sip cappuccinos and nibble on criossants!”
Kirk said – “Sounds great!”
The next questions was where in France. I’d been to Paris and didn’t really feel like going to a big city. So, we settled on Provence. Now…where in Provence? I was missing the Mediterranean, so we started to look at the Cote D’Azur. A woman in my office was in the South of France for a month in the fall, so I asked here where a nice place, not too crazy busy, not too terribly touristy, but on the Mediterranean might be. She thought for a moment, and said, “Antibes”.
So, on that one suggestions, Antibes it was!
Kirk worked with a travel agent and found a hotel and booked flights and we were set. It was all very last minute, and things have been crazy and hectic for the past few weeks with Kirk’s accident and a family death. So neither one of us really had any time to do any research on the place, it was a bit of a ‘wing-it’ holiday.
We hopped on the plane Friday night, and more or less lost Saturday because of the time difference. Our flight was delayed out of Vancouver, so when we arrived in Heathrow it was a bit of a scramble to get to the next flight. When we went through security I went first and fully expected Kirk to set off the metal detector now that he has a good number of screws and a metal plate in his shoulder. It didn’t go off in Vancouver, but I thought it might in Heathrow, I had assumed more sensitive equipment. But it stayed silent. We were both surprised!
We arrived in Nice, my luggage didn’t, at least not right away. Apparently it stayed behind in Heathrow for some reason, but it was on the last flight to Nice at midnight and I was told it would arrive the next morning and be delivered to the hotel.
A taxi driver wanted $85 Euros to take us to the hotel in Juan les Pains, seemed a bit outrageous, so we decided to explore other options and found ourselves on a very nice bus without any really clear idea of where we were going, where to get off, or how to get to the hotel once we did get off. But it all worked out. When we got off we just started walking towards the water with the knowledge that our hotel was a block off the beach, and just off the train tracks. Couldn’t be that hard to find it! And it wasn’t hard at all.
So we have a week here on the French Riviera, with absolutely no plans whatsoever, and a pleasant surprise that the Cannes Film Festival is on. We probably won’t get tickets for anything, but who knows, we might stumble onto some star sightings when we head there in a day or two!
I couldn’t decide where to blog this trip – here or on The Philosophical Fish. Since I have my third 365 project underway, it seems onerous to blog in two places for one trip, but I need to keep up with my photo a day. So I’ll post there, but just a short post, and the rest will be here.
May 20, 2012 – A cloudy and cool day on the French Riviera, but it makes for a quieter day. And the mega yachts out at anchor are mind blowing – the scary thing?
These ones are little.
