Rewind a Bit: Monaco and Nice

Due to not having any pictures uploaded for these two, we hadn’t commented on our time in Monaco or Nice yet.

We hit Monaco when we were still in Eze, as it is very close.  Our hotel is close enough to Monaco that they have packages for the annual Monaco Grand Prix (for which preparations were underway during our brief time there).

It’s only about a 15-20 minute drive from Chateau Eza to Monaco, letting us fit it in as a quick day trip.  We went on Monaco on the 17th, during our last full day in Eze.  We had the GPS take us to a spot in Monte Carlo (which is just a district within Monaco) and then looked for parking, as the roads were blocked off in some places due to the GP preparations.

Kelly was sporting her new hat (picked up in Austin just before our trip; it’s packable!) that day, and some random German woman accosted her on the way to the restroom, asking where she got the hat, saying something like ‘I have seen everything, and that is fabulous!‘.

We also hit the oceanographic museum and aquarium there, where Kelly was doing her best to capture some pictures of these little baby (3 month old) clownfish:

We also toured the palace, but it wasn’t camera friendly (and any I managed to get anyway are on the big camera and thus not uploaded).  The walk from the aquarium to the palace (and also the cathedral, which was pretty but a bit odd…I mean, it had one of those ‘make a souvenir penny’ machines inside the cathedral!) was nice, as one side of the walk (the side towards the ocean) is entirely filled with Princess Grace park.  It was very well done and well maintained.  The palace tour itself was pretty interesting to see and pretty short.  The view of the marina from just outside the palace was nice, too:

Our trip to Nice wasn’t a day trip like our Monaco excursion, despite being almost as close to Eze as Monaco.  Nice happened  to be in the same direction we would head when leaving Eze (and the route runs right through it), so we stopped for Nice for a few hour lunch-and-shopping break after leaving Eze on our roughly 3 hour drive to Gordes.

Nice was bigger than any of the cities we had been through yet (excluding Genoa, which we didn’t really stop in…only grabbed a car from), but we confined ourselves to the main promenade along the beach.  It was pretty busy and had plenty of beachgoers, even this early in the season:

I think it would probably be pretty crowded (too crowded) during peak season. The picture above was in a less-populated part of the beach, as it was a section of the beach controlled by a hotel on the other side of the street (a street runs along the ocean just to the right of this picture).  We bought more gelato (surprise), and then roamed in towards the city, away from the water, in an attempt to find less touristy shopping and less touristy food offerings.

Kelly was on a mission to locate a Ben Simon store (for certain shoes sold there), and we found that pretty easily (with success on the shoes, too).  A cute bistro next door to Ben Simon was a winner for lunch, and then we roamed again for more shopping.  Kelly discovered a new store that is right up her alley called ba&sh, which appears to be stocked entirely with things that she would like to buy.  They do not have any stores in the US, but they are in a number of countries over here. We’ve seen another one here in Paris, and I see that they are in the UK as well (so maybe she’ll have another crack at them in London).

The main plazas in Nice were full of pedicabs looking like this:

I wouldn’t mind of Austin adopted this style…probably less easy to weave through a crowd, but they keep the rider protected from rain.

We were glad we stopped in Nice, but are also glad that we apportioned our days to other places.  During early planning, we had considered staying in Nice for a few days.