Pictures from France – Cannes, Nice, and Italy

(I thought I was just putting captions under my pictures above, but it looks like regular text to me. So consider those captions, and the paragraph below the beginning of the actual post, please, and I will do better with my next post. WordPress keeps changing things on me, and I don’t post often enough to keep up!)

I’m home now, and finally able to post a bit more. The WordPress interface on my iPad was annoying the hell out of me, so I gave up, though I originally had a goal of posting here every day, at least a picture or two, to share my journey with you. Instead, I will post now, and catch you up.

These pictures are from our first few days in France. After our day in Mougins, we went to Cannes, and then the following day to Nice. In Nice, we went to the beautiful Cathedral there, the Cathedral of Saint Nicholas. Pictures are not allowed inside, so we don’t have any of those. We did drive up just as a beautiful couple came outside, newly wed. Their clothes were beautiful, but not what we would consider traditional wedding clothes…no tux, no white gown. I didn’t take a picture, it seemed invasive and rude. While we were inside, after Carey was scolded for taking pictures (we missed the signs somehow, which were plentiful), and a bit later we were asked to leave the main part of the cathedral so they could hold a baptism. Very much a busy church.

After that, we went to the Musee National Marc Chagall, which houses his amazing paintings of the Biblical Message, specifically the Old Testament. That was amazing and beautiful. There I had my Salade Nicoise, which was a goal of mine, to have that in Nice. From there, we walked to the sea and watched folks parasailing, had an ice cream cone, and just soaked in the beauty of it all.

The next day, we ventured into Italy. It was beautiful but we didn’t do any research on what to do there, what village to visit, so we paid a bit of a price for that, not seeing much, just walking around neighborhoods and looking for a place to have pizza for lunch. Not easy as restaurants close between lunch and dinner, we had missed lunchtime by looking for a particular kind of pizza, and we didn’t want to be out past dark, as the roads can be pretty tricky.

I really liked what we saw of Nice, Cannes, and even the little Italian towns. I would return perhaps and get to know them a bit more. As it was we only got a small taste of each. One thing I would do differently is NOT rent such a big car. Actually, I had requested a smaller car, but most cars in Europe are manual, and we wanted an automatic. We can both drive a stick, but it’s been a long time, and with so many hills and narrow roads, we decided it would be better to stick with automatic. They had one other car available for us, which was a small Audi, but that was considered an upgrade and would have cost us more money. In retrospect, we should have spent the money, I think it would have been less frustrating getting around, trying to park, making tight turns, etc.

Next I will share our trip to the town of Grasse, known for perfume, and a boat trip to Saint Tropez.