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.