Tourettes-sur-Loup and Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey

On our second morning we left Nice intending to drive northwest. I'd picked out a route on the map, but it didn't take long before we were regretting not renting a GPS along with the car. Easy enough to see the route on paper, more difficult to trace it in reality. We drove along the coast, missed our turning, muddled around, spent money on petrol we didn't need (confusing display on the dashboard), accidentally ended up on the toll road heading back towards Nice, got off the toll road, and then headed north on the first road that seemed to go that way just for the sake of escaping from the busy horrors of the Côte d'Azur.

And it turned out to be all for the best (putting aside that tiny winding road we ended up on along the way, and the head-on collision narrowly avoided at the next big town). We ended up in Tourettes-sur-Loup, a beautiful little mediaeval hill town, just in time for lunch.

It was the first of many mediaeval towns perched on the edge of a hill, but it was also one of the best: for being so unexpected; for the relief at having got somewhere at last; for the lunch it provided; and also for the fact that it calls itself "cité des violettes" and has its own violet heritage centre (not greatly exciting in itself, but as a violet lover it was enough that such a thing existed and that outside it hovered a scent of violet coming even from the flowerless greens).

We only walked briefly around, then settled on the terrace of the clearly popular Café des Sports on the square where had mountainous salads - one Niçoise, one prosciutto and goats cheese.

This is the view on leaving from the other side of town:

From there we briefly visited Pont-du-Loup, nestled at the bottom of the gorge. You can see the remains of a viaduct that crossed the gorge above the village, that was destroyed in the Second World War. It must have been spectacular both to ride across and to stand under. There was a tiny open museum-room in the village with a few historical photos and a little information. I've found historical photos on YouTube too, at this link. It was somehow particularly odd to think of the Germans who may have been stationed somewhere so idyllic and so apparently cut off from everything. It would have been hard to believe in a war going on, or your part in it.

We drove on, finally stopping for the night in Saint-Vallier-de-Thiey, not from any particular attraction there but more because we were tired of driving (especially after navigating our way through the northern edges of Grasse) and there was a Logis hotel there - with no rooms free, as it turned out, but we were able to stay in the Préjoly opposite it. It certainly wasn't the most modern hotel, but it was reasonable, and we had a huge balcony that we had our dinner of bread and cheese on, overlooking the town fields. The man running the hotel was great - with a kind of goofy charm, continually joking. I'd recommend the hotel just for him, in fact.

Nice

Day 1 - We flew from Frankfurt to Nice on an early flight. As soon as we arrived and took the shuttle to the car rental, it became clear that we'd packed all wrong. I knew it was going to be warmer than Frankfurt - which had just dipped into a wintry spell - but I wasn't prepared for it being quite so hot. Here's the Promenade d'Anglais looking all tropical:

I've wanted to see Nice for a long time, more for its being one of those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English destinations that pops up in literature than out of any expectation of finding it as I imagined or wanted it to be. And indeed it wasn't. The front, even from the plane, was more built up than I expected - as far as the eye could see. I hoped to be more excited by the view of the sea - after all, I've been living land-locked for many years now - but it was somehow a bit flat and undramatic, and I was surprised to find that the beach in front of the Promenade was composed of big stones, like Brighton. It was full of orangey-brown near-naked people sunbathing, an activity I find hard to fathom, especially if it involves lying around on rocks and not sand. It must take some dedication.

We were staying in a hotel (Le Panoramic) on a hill behind the town, with a good view over the whole. The picture below sums up the whole, built high and narrow, and somehow giving a sense of everything being scraped together and far from affluent.

The hotel was nice and friendly, rooms a little small and old-fashioned, but somehow appropriate to Nice. We got good advice on driving down the hill and leaving our car in one of the free lots at the bottom, to take the new tram line into town. What we didn't, unfortunately, realize was that the "solo" (single) tickets we travelled either way on were the only tickets that didn't work for the park-and-ride lot that we were in, leading to a bit of drama when we couldn't get out of it in the evening and thought with horror that we were going to have to pay the 48 Euro "adjustment" listed on the machines. We got around it in the end somewhat more cheaply by buying some kind of transfer tickets for 3 Euros, then travelling one stop out and back (tickets are validated in machines on the trams).

We visited the old town and had a disappointing lunch at a kind of corner snack bar - a silly mistake driven by the lateness of the hour by the time we got there. I could have had the chick-pea flour pancake I'd been looking forward to trying, but instead we ordered some kind of pizza-like slices and some little dim-sum-like things that I thought had anchovies in them (they were labelled as Niçoise) but were actually full of pork. The old town was full of narrow streets and satisfyingly pretty, even though quite touristy.

After the old town, we walked a little along the front - where a man tried the gold ring scam on us. Not that we knew that there was such a thing as the gold ring scam in advance, but his behaviour was very strange, and luckily we're not the kind of people to take a gold ring that some stranger is holding out to us anyway - myself, I'd be far too concerned about what I should do with it and where I should best hand it in.

Once we'd walked through the market area and into the main part of town looking (unsuccessfully) for a bookshop (Smollett said there were none in 1764 - perhaps it's still true?), we were overcome by the heat and sunshine and took refuge in a cinema where we saw the first film showing in English that afternoon, My Life with Liberace. It was a good way to spend the afternoon. We haven't been to the cinema since arriving in Frankfurt, where it takes some effort to find anything showing without German dubbing. It was a good film too - less a biopic about Liberace than an interesting and uncomfortable portrait of bad relationship.

France 2013

My parents very kindly looked after the cats for a few days, while we took a trip to the south of France.

We flew from Frankfurt to Nice on 24th September, hired a car, and drove through Provence for just over a week, returning from Nice on 2nd October. Below is an outline of our trip, which I'll try to flesh out in the coming days.

Tuesday - arrived Nice (Hôtel le Panoramic).

Wednesday - to Saint Valliers-de-Thiey (Hôtel Préjoly), via Tourettes-sur-Loup.

Thursday - to Goult (Hôtellerie Notre-Dame de Lumieres), via Castellane, Gorges du Verdon, Moustiers-Saint-Marie.

Friday - remained in Goult. Visited Gordes.

Saturday - Orange (Hôtel Kyriad Orange Centre), via Avignon.

Sunday - remained in Orange. Visited Pont du Gard.

Monday - Oraison (Hôtel La Grande Bastide), via L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire, Forcalquier).

Tuesday - Annot (Hôtel Le Beauséjour), via Forcalquier, Ganagobie monastery.

Wednesday - Nice (to fly out), via Entrevaux, Touët-sur-Var, and an unfortunate late digression via Colomars.