Goodbye to Italy, Hello to France
On Sunday, we had to finally say goodbye to Italy and make our way to France. It wasn’t as straightforward as just hopping in the car and driving over; we’d returned our car on Friday in La Spezia on our way to Vernazza. Being Sunday, local car rental locations are all closed, leading us to have to make a booking at an airport location to pick up our car. The nearest major airport was Genoa, which was 2 train rides away: Vernazza – Sestri Levante (on a basic 2nd class local train, no assigned seats) and then Sestri Levante to Genoa (with first class assigned seats). It was probably 40 minutes for the first segment and just under an hour for the second.
The train cars aren’t really set up with space for full sized checked luggage, so we had those in the open area the the end of the local trains, and in the hallway outside of our little first class cluster of seats on the second. The situation in first was actually kind of worse, luggage-wise: with the luggage in the hallway, it left enough room for just one person to walk between it and the glassed in area for our seats. That’s cool if it’s just a person..but if they have luggage too, ugh: they’re squeezing it in between, lifting it up in the air, whatever. A bunch of pretty clueless people got on after us just sort of stopped moving and stood there, jammed up, not resolving anything when there was a big luggage rack pile up. Plus, they didn’t seem to understand the whole notion of assigned seats; they tried to sit in some seats, only to have someone else come by and say ‘we have these seats reserved’…to which they’d say ‘we have reserved seats’. I’m not sure how the standoff ended, but everyone was seated eventually. We made it to Genoa, and took a cab to the airport. We picked our a car (a little Mercedes A-series diesel hatchback) and were on our way. It was to be a 2.5-3 hour drive.
We wanted to stop somewhere in Italy during the drive for a late lunch. Most of the drive was going to be in Italy anyway; Eze is not too far across the border. Not really having any rhyme or reason to pick one city or another along our route to stop off at, we decided to pull off at Finale Ligure, which is where we know our friend Vanessa has family and has been a bunch of times. It was just a few miles off the route, and the old part of the town was a cute medieval walled city as well:
It looks line Finale is a hot spot for climbers; walking around the town, we saw several businesses that sold climbing gear or offered outings. We also saw a large number of pretty serious looking mountain bikers ending rides by entering the city, so there must be some good routes nearby.
Our one mistake here was that we were a bit late, as some of the places that looked best to us had diners finishing lunch but were not seating anyone new for lunch. In the end, we found a decent little pizza bar right across from the main basilica. I had some excellent gnocchi with pesto (pesto originates from this part of Italy) and Kelly had pizza.
After leaving Finale, we were back on the road to Eze. The drive was relatively easy, as we were on one of the A (‘autostrada’) roads…basically like a US interstate, but narrower/with fewer lanes, and tolled. Shortly after Ventimiglia, we hit the border between Italy and France, and it was completely anticlimactic. It was basically like crossing a US state border: we saw a sign welcoming us to France, but there was no gate / no customs / nobody to talk to / just highway. Eze was not much farther down the road, but it took longer than the distance would suggest, as the roads get very curvy very fast. At this point, we’re basically in short mountains on a 2 lane (one lane in each direction) road with hairpin turns left and right. It’s hard to take it too aggressively in a little hatchback with no grip and no acceleration.
We made it to Eze, and after circling a public parking lot with no spaces for a while, we saw a sign pointing to Chateau Eza (our hotel). We knew that you cannot actually drive to the hotel (there are no cars up on the hilltop with the old village, where our hotel lives), but we thought it must be the way we should be going. Partway up the hill, we saw the valet station for our hotel:
We were able to leave the car with him, and head on up to our hotel. It is pretty incredible: the entire town is basically completely hewn from stone (it was originally a castle) and subdivided now into a series of residences, businesses, and a few hotels.
We had booked an standard room at the hotel, but when they’d checked us in, they said that our room had been recently remodeled (we weren’t sure if we heard that it was completed 3 weeks or 3 days prior), and ended up with a ‘superior’ room. It was awesome: brand new and big (extra big, considering that this town is crammed onto the top of this hill).
I think the bathroom is actually larger than our entire room in Vernazza. Kelly is a big fan of the giant jacuzzi tub (she’s on bath #3 as I type this):
When at the reception desk today to ask about other things (our day trip to Monaco), we asked what room number we’re in, as we hadn’t see a number on the door or over the door or anywhere in the room. Apparently the hotel refers to our room as ‘Musee’, as our unit (and perhaps the one unit above us that enters off of our vestibule) was formerly some sort of museum. I started noticing that they do in fact refer to it as that (the valet’s inventory sheet had my ‘Musee’ listed as my room).
The town (well, the old part that is on top of the hill…the old part is called Eze-Villlage) is quite small and we can walk to pretty much anywhere in the old town in 2-3 minutes. Here are a slew of pictures showing what the old town is like:
We had a stellar dinner last night at the hotel’s restaurant. I think I’ll leave that to a Kelly post. She can also talk about our time yesterday at a factory tour of a a perfumer adjacent to Eze-Village called Frangoner.
Today, we took the car and drove to Monaco, which is 8-9 km from here, but about 20 minutes (curvy and steep roads). I’ll leave that to a separate post as well.
I’ve also been taking a bunch of photos of Eze with my 7D, but I haven’t had a chance to upload much of those at all. I will be heading up to the highest point of the village tomorrow morning to take some pictures, and so will probably post a few more Eze photos when I get a chance to upload them (probably sometime in the next day or two, when we’ve moved on to our hotel in Gordes, about 3 hours west of here). We expect to check out of the hotel tomorrow late morning and drive to check out Nice for a while, which is also quite close by (we can see the airport from the balcony of our hotel bar). We’ll probably spend 3 or 4 hours there tomorrow, seeing the sights a bit and having a late lunch, and then moving on to our 2 nights in Gordes.