Well…so much for posting while I was in France. That went real well. I have two excuses, though. One was that I came down with a cold for a few days while we were in the Cote d’Azur (nothing too terrible, but it was one more thing to deal with), and another was that I got an extremely unexpected freelance writing assignment that I couldn’t say no to, and that took up all of my writing bandwidth while still leaving me time to have a vacation!
We flew into Charles de Gaulle airport, then caught a flight to Nice (above and below).
One night in Nice, then we rented a car and drove to nearby Vence, where we navigated wicked hairpin turns to our really lovely hillside basement apartment rental, with our own private garden area and a view of the Mediterranean.
We visited larger cities/towns like Antibes, Cannes, Cap Ferrat and Monaco, as well as tiny hill towns (Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Tourrettes-sur-Loup, Eze-village…so many of them!) where I took pictures of cats…
…and doors.
Villfranche-sur-Mer was a colorful little Italian-esqe town guarded over by a 12th-century citadel.
If you like that boat, you’ll love the humble specimens in Monaco.
After a week in Vence, we headed back to Nice to take the TGV high-speed train to Paris. (We were lucky to miss one transit strike that would have probably canceled our train trip, but fell right into another strike on our way back to Charles de Gaulle a few days later…everything worked out, though). We had a nice little view from the fifth floor of our favorite hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Pres near the Notre Dame (we spent a good bit of time coveting those balconies).
I’m not sure about this new addition to the Paris view, right outside the entrance to the Tulieries garden. At least it served as a handy point of reference the next day when we emerged from a nearby metro station and were trying to figure out which direction we were facing.
We got home, shook off our jet lag and got to work putting in our vegetable garden (just like last year). That vegetable garden will be the subject of my next post (hopefully the smell of fresh compost will be out of my nose by then).
