4 April 2008: From our St. Tropez campground, we took the scenic coastal route towards Cannes and stopped off for lunch. It seemed like I shot off about a hundred pictures, the scenery was so beautiful. But, we’ll see how many actually turn out since we were driving. Cannes wasn’t exactly what I expected. It looked a bit run down to me. But we didn’t really take much time to explore it either. After a late lunch, we took more time driving than expected, so we decided to spend the night at a campground near Nice instead of heading further.
The next morning, we did another scenic coastal drive. This time from the campground near Nice to Monaco, along the Moyenne Corniche. There are three Corniches, the Basse Corniche (Low Corniche or Corniche Inferieure) which goes right along the waterfront; the Moyenne Corniche (Middle Corniche) which runs above that with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean; and Napoleon’s crowning road-construction achievement, the Grande Corniche (High Corniche) which caps the cliffs from almost 1,600 above the sea. This is where Grace Kelly was first filmed speeding through in the Hitchcock movie To Catch a Thief (which Sean and I must see now). During the filming of that movie was when she met Prince Rainier of Monaco, and later she married him and became Princess Grace. Coincidentally, she was also killed in a car wreck on the same road. Again, I gave the camera another workout. It is VERY apparent that there is A LOT of money in this area! We stopped off halfway along the trip to the very cute hilltop town of Eze for a nice lunch. (It looked like a great place to stay, but don’t know how much that would set you back.) We really got lucky with the weather the past few days!
Then, with Kailani napping good after lunch, we motored over the French border to Italy for 2-3 hour down their expensive but fast autostrada (freeway/tollroad) for a late night arrival into the town of Levanto. Again, the border crossing was almost non-existent. But, there was a sign indicating that you were now in Italy. We were very surprised how mountainous it is when driving through the Italian Riviera. Between those mountains were canyons with heavily populated towns along the coast. I read in one of our books that the Italians don’t mess around when it comes to engineering their freeways, and it’s very true. We went through tunnel after tunnel, over several bridges and through even more tunnels. (It’s not easy to catch up on guide book reading when you’re going through them!) But, why mess around when there are so many mountains, right? I’m pretty nervous about conversing in this country as Sean and I know virtually no Italian. But, I guess we’ll see….
The next morning, we did another scenic coastal drive. This time from the campground near Nice to Monaco, along the Moyenne Corniche. There are three Corniches, the Basse Corniche (Low Corniche or Corniche Inferieure) which goes right along the waterfront; the Moyenne Corniche (Middle Corniche) which runs above that with breathtaking views of the Mediterranean; and Napoleon’s crowning road-construction achievement, the Grande Corniche (High Corniche) which caps the cliffs from almost 1,600 above the sea. This is where Grace Kelly was first filmed speeding through in the Hitchcock movie To Catch a Thief (which Sean and I must see now). During the filming of that movie was when she met Prince Rainier of Monaco, and later she married him and became Princess Grace. Coincidentally, she was also killed in a car wreck on the same road. Again, I gave the camera another workout. It is VERY apparent that there is A LOT of money in this area! We stopped off halfway along the trip to the very cute hilltop town of Eze for a nice lunch. (It looked like a great place to stay, but don’t know how much that would set you back.) We really got lucky with the weather the past few days!
Then, with Kailani napping good after lunch, we motored over the French border to Italy for 2-3 hour down their expensive but fast autostrada (freeway/tollroad) for a late night arrival into the town of Levanto. Again, the border crossing was almost non-existent. But, there was a sign indicating that you were now in Italy. We were very surprised how mountainous it is when driving through the Italian Riviera. Between those mountains were canyons with heavily populated towns along the coast. I read in one of our books that the Italians don’t mess around when it comes to engineering their freeways, and it’s very true. We went through tunnel after tunnel, over several bridges and through even more tunnels. (It’s not easy to catch up on guide book reading when you’re going through them!) But, why mess around when there are so many mountains, right? I’m pretty nervous about conversing in this country as Sean and I know virtually no Italian. But, I guess we’ll see….
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