With several hours of a coach journey ahead, just a light snack for breakfast with no more than fruit juice and coffee from the crowded breakfast room as everyone need to be ready by 8:30am. The coach left Planet Hotel at 8:40am with many people making an effort to thank the manager and his staff for an excellent stay.
It was autostrada for most of the enjoyable journey from northern Italy to the south of France. The passengers may not look too happy – but they were.
Rodney had his i-Pad so was constantly giving us updates as to our location, which was useful. We made good time so only stopped once on the way through and the motorway/autostrada service staff didn’t speak English, but we managed coffees anyway, even though they struggled to interpret an “Americano” and we did manage to get a small jug of milk and hot water.
Monaco is a tiny principality as most of you will know, and we passed by, high on the road above this spectacular principality before descending to our destination of Beaulieu sur Mer, just a few kilometres beyond.
This proved to be a nightmare for the coach driver, as instead of taking the main road to Nice and doubling back, he cut through and took the direct road, that included several sharp hairpin bends, requiring a reverse and a shuffle round and a road so narrow, that it took about 5 minutes to squeeze past a less than happy elderly Audi driver coming up the hill, with traffic banking up behind us. We all thought it highly entertaining – until he reached the town and couldn’t get under a railway bridge! The pic shows John talking to the local police whilst we were taking bets as to the possibility of him being arrested for causing traffic chaos, with a healthy build up of traffic as the coach blocked the T junction!
We unloaded the coach and grabbed our luggage whilst tour leader John headed off to locate the hotel, we sort of meandered around aimlessly, before heading off after John. It didn’t really help that all our paperwork said “The Artemis Hotel”, but when we finally arrived, found that it was now an “Ibis” hotel!
The hotel was about 100 metres from the railway station and about 130 to a supermarket that was almost adjacent. Our rooms were allocated and keys plus TV remotes(!) very quickly as they had them all lined up on the counter. Our room was right on the road junction and nearest the railway station, (see the pics) so there was a fair bit of noise from rail and road, even though the rail is electric.
We went for a walk down to the waterfront and on our return, to the supermarket, but the lack of a fridge in the rooms was an inconvenience even though the supermarket goods were tempting.
We walked down the street to the second or third restaurant - and had pasta! Not exciting, but not much else appealed. The service was friendly enough though. The proprietor was happy enough to take our photograph, but stepped back into the road so that the name of the establishment was clearly shown. Sensible chap.
By this time, the exposure to cigarette smoke throughout the trip had manifested itself with an annoying cough and runny nose... Early bed again but free Wi-Fi meant a little bit of blog updating. That was up to day 4. (In reality, this blog is being written on day 20 anyway. Whoops.)
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