Clueless in the UK

Well, we survived a trip to the South of France a couple of weeks ago. It was excellent in a number of ways, funny in others …

Evening Distraction

The first hotel in Antibes had a great location … uh … but that's about it. We didn't get the room we were told we'd get just the day before, which was warning number #1. Warning #2 was that the A/C in the room did not work. Then the fridge door fell off, and the bathroom garbage can wasn't properly attached, and we were pretty suspicious things weren't going to go well. So Sue walked down the street and found another hotel which had one room available, and we prepared to move there the following day - we just had to survive one night there.

That night at 10pm or thereabouts, our room was too hot, I had to open the bedroom window. I did what all people do when they open the window - looked down - and this particular time I was treated to a man and a woman having sex in the hotel's breakfast area. Score!! It was easy to see as long as I stood on one leg, bent slightly to the left, stood on the tippy toes …  I whispered to Sue what was going on, and she had to take a peak. After a minute she came back and said, "Another guy showed up and is just sitting there!" I thought, wow, those crazy French, boy do they know how to have fun, they are not shy about sex, he's just there keeping them compa — ohhhh …

For 30 long LONG minutes I stayed in bed, but finally … finally I couldn't take it anymore, I just had to know! So I got up and had another peak, and yes, a ménage à trois! I wasn't about to complain, to be honest, except … wait … that was the breakfast area … those were the tables and chairs we'd be using tomorrow … gross, man!

Then at 12:30am a spontaneous party started in the same place, and it was loud, no more sex, but loud and kept us awake until 2am. What a night! Boy was I going to give it to them in the morning.

It gets better, believe it or not

So the next morning I go downstairs to find one of the two brothers running this "family establishment" and ask him if I could have a word in private. I basically told him what happened, he was "shocked, simply shocked!" and I told him I was going back upstairs to pack and we could sort out the bill after he has had some time to think about it.

During that time he must have talked it over with his brother because when I came back downstairs to finish things with him, he had already come to the following conclusion: You made up the whole thing about the sex. I laughed and said, "Do you honestly think I am making this up?" He did. So I said, "How about I tell you exactly what happened …" and he said, "OK". This is all happening downstairs in a small lobby area (it was more like a B&B than a hotel, actually) and I said, "Would you like to do it in private?" and he said, "No, here is OK." and I looked around at a poor innocent by-stander sitting on the couch in the lobby with his laptop, and said, "OK."

I am not shy about describing various sex acts, and I just told him how it was in detail, and Sue happened to be coming back into the hotel as I was saying "as he was pumping her from behind, she was …" and Sue saw the poor guy on the couch looking rather uncomfortable about the whole thing.

In the end, the guy just ripped up our credit card information and off we went, no charge. He promised to investigate.

(I know what you're thinking: Jon, why no pictures!?)

Anyway, that whole incident put me in a very good mood after we had settled the bill without paying for the one night and moved into our new hotel. So funny, ridiculous, and entertaining all at once. Normally I am shy about demanding money back, etc., but apparently if you want to talk about sex, I don't have a problem with that at all!

But there's more to our trip than peep shows, so let's get on with it, shall we?

Our friends in Valbonne

Our friends The Chartiers from Jason's old day care in Palo Alto had moved to Valbonne a year or so ago, so we spent the first two days visiting with them. What a treat! They have a beautiful house in the hills, with views of the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, and wild forest as their back yard.

Here we are enjoying a nice relaxing drink on the front porch of their house:

 

We went for a walk in those woods with our two and two of their three, discovering plants and bugs along the way. We all really enjoyed it: 

 

Jason with his friend Antoine - they used to go to daycare together in California a couple years back: 

 

Gourdon 

The next day we hooked up with the Chartiers again and they took us around to a few nice places. First, we drove to Gourdon, which is a Medieval village on a cliff, basically. We stopped to take a picture along the mountain roads:

 

 While in Gourdon we were gaga over the views, but the kids made straight for the candy store on the side of the road. French candy is better than British candy, or so we are told:

We had to include this picture of Marie Eve because she looks so nice and French in this picture:

We bought a number of items from this store and had them shipped home. It was a perfume store and it was … full of … you know … perfume. Jason, who is into making potions, was going gaga over all the little potion-sized bottles in that store:

Here's a shot which somehow manages to capture the beauty of this little village, looking down at a restaurant truly on the edge of the cliffs. There's something about the nerve, the gall, the utter disregard for what's stupid and dangerous that I love about a village on the edge of a cliff:

 

We took a brief hike at the top in the mountains/hills on our way to lunch in another village. This is a view of the Mediteranean Sea in the distance, probably Antibe in fact:

 

After a nice lunch, we separated from the Chartiers and headed off to Gorges du Loup and played in a river while we were waiting our chance to tour the Florian Confectionery. The river was nice, but we never did get that tour because they were overwhelmed with visitors at the same time we were there, and they all wanted the French translation:

 

That was a long day, as were most of our days on this trip. There's a lot to see and we wanted to see it. The kids, sometimes at each other's throats during the day, were very tired at night. While Sue and I were watching the last two episodes of "24" on our laptop, Jason and Madeline had fallen asleep like this:

Out cold … clearly not at each other's throats now, are they!?!?!?

Antibe Penisula and Les Grottes de St. Cezaine

Next day we were on our own and decided to hit the Antibe Penisula. We got a very special treat actually. We drove around for a while along the water's edge and then went inland just a bit before turning down a road we thought was heading towards the water again. This road got smaller and smaller as we went, finally with a brick wall on both sides, no wider than a single lane, dirt road. I wasn't sure if we'd even be able to turn around.

When we got to the end there was a small parking lot for about 3 cars so we backed in and walked down to the water, and hiked around near Cap Gros. It's hard to tell from the photos but it was incredibly windy, hard to stand up in fact, and very blue and dramatic looking:

Later we hung out at crescent shaped La Garoupe beach and had lunch. Nobody seemed to mind that I was trying to order in French - they were very friendly:

From there we took off for about an hour drive to Les Grottes de St. Cezaire, which is basically some underground caves with nice stalagmites and stalactites. There were lots of interesting shots but here are two of my favorites.

In this first one, the tour guide is playing the stalactites like a xylophone (very cool sounding) next to something which looks like a white skeleton which is actually stalactites and stalagmites meeting in the middle:

And this one is just our family shot inside the cave after everyone else left: 

The way home from Les Grottes was through some of the most winding, backward, one lane roads through the hills and small towns in the South of France. It was like being in the middle of nowhere, farms, paths, etc., but the GPS never led us astray as far … as we … know.

Nice

Next day we hung out in Nice in the morning. Our trusty GPS got us there and we walked around on the beach in the morning skipping rocks. The water was unbelievably blue, like Hawaii blue only more so, but it wasn't that warm that day so we didn't really go swimming. But we did get wet and play in the waves on the rocky beach:

Jason is in major face making mode whenever we take pictures: 

 

Monaco

I am currently being mocked here by some of our friends (ok, perhaps just one) because when she said, "Where are you going during the half-term?" I replied, "We're going to the South of France to visit Nice and Morocco." You can tell how involved I am in the planning when I don't even know it's Monaco, but you can tell something even more disturbing when you realize I didn't think there was anything wrong with a South of France trip that included Morocco.

When we finished lunch in Nice we asked the GPS to take us to Monaco and it refused, and just before Sue decided to throw the GPS out the window, I suggested that maybe Monaco is it's own sort of country or something. The GPS liked that idea very much and off we went!

I'll just say that I thought it was one of the coolest looking places to build a city/country/whatever I have ever seen. We also got very lucky with the weather, so the ocean was so blue and so nice, but really there's nothing bad to say about scenes like this. The water is probably hundreds of feet below us in this shot from the Prince Albert Garden:

 

Jason never misses an opportunity to be silly: 

 

 Sheer rock faces up against marinas full of high end yachts:

The guide book had bad things to say about Monaco which I thought was all rubbish. Even the apartment buildings look nice to me. And we couldn't leave without a shot of the Monaco Grand Prix track which had run just a few days before we got there:

 

Oh, and I think Sue will kill me of I forget to mention that we went to the Musee Oceonographique and had dinner at a creperie. To be honest, the best crepes we've had are still the ones across the street from our house in Hampstead. 

Cannes

Cannes just didn't do it for me. The beaches were so-so, the city was kinda yucky, "I've seen Monaco, Cannes is no Monaco." On the other hand I am not sure there is any sand in Monaco, so that kinda sucks a little bit I suppose, if you're into that kind of thing (and I am).

Like the Grand Prix in Monaco, we missed the Cannes Film Festival by just a couple of days. The kids got to try out the red carpet, and I am pleased with how discreet they were:

We took a "train/really-a-bus" tour around Cannes and I cannot recommend against this enough. It was slow, boring, and the city was exposed as its ugly self. OK - I admit it might be nice if we're there with no kids, enjoying the night life perhaps, as the tour books suggest. But, we got the kids, you see, and we see things through those glasses. Oh - but of course, I am just talking about myself. For all I know, Sue loved Cannes!

Anyway, the train tour took us to the top and we were able to get a couple of nice pictures. Here's the best one:

Sun Worshiping 

The one thing we saw wherever we went where there were beaches was these horrific sun worshipers. They were white people burned dark brown in a very deliberate manner. They were all over the place, and it was really quite horrible in my opinion. Naturally, I have a picture:

There were many more old, wrinkled women than men, and I found myself wondering how old some of them were. So I went up to one lady who looked to be about 65 years old and asked her in my best French how old she was, and she replied, "25 Euros". Can you believe it! I thought she looked at least 60!