The last main part of our trip has been hard to get to, but well worthwhile now that we are here. The trip from Venice to Milan was challenging, and involved a few forced marches with our full luggage load, but that was nothing compared to the emotional travails of the Milan to Nice / Grasse leg.The day began well with an extremely positive taxi experience getting back to Milan Centrale Stazione (no more walking!). The train took a while to find because we were given wrong information by several people, and the platform signage was still showing the details of the train that had left 2 hours ago. Without being particularly salubrious for a first class carriage, the trip itself was interesting and smooth for the first 4 hours of 5. However, as we approached an hour out of Nice an Italtrens person informed us in Italian that the train would go no further then Ventimiglia – the last stop in Italy – due to a rail strike in France. Luckily a very nice and patient young tri-lingual Frenchmqn who had put up with being the 6th man in our 6 man cabin for the past few hours both translated the initial information and then helped us work out the next steps – which consisted of everyone piling onto a local train to Nice 2 hours later. When we finally got to Nice and found the hire car place, it was closed on Sunday. Handy. We had to hire a different car for 24 hours and the go back to get the one we had booked the following day.
The GPS managed to finally get us to the villa, albeit rather indirectly – as the roads are so close and convoluted that it has difficulty at times working out which road you are on and occasionally gives apocryphal directions. But we got there to find our French hosts most hospitable indeed – the villa was well lit, warm, and they went out of their way to provide us with some provisions to survive the night.The villa is fabulous. Beautifully set on a
hillside looking over a valley filled with similar types of character-ful homes and towards the Medieval city of Grasse, it is three stories of all the Provencal style we could want, inside and out. The terraced gardens have two pools, as well as olive trees, and a couple of stone and wooden outbuildings. All of the rooms are large, spacious, comfortable and have windows opening as doors to the main view. Clearly it is set up mainly for summer, but it is warm and comfortable now – and with the rainy weather of the last few days, a great place to hole up.
Driving around here is interesting, to say the least. The roads are so complex and intricate and just plain weird that any modern town planner would be shot just for thinking of it! I've come to the liberating conclusion that driving around here is much the same as building in Venice – you do whatever you want in front and don't pay the slightest attention to what is happening anywhere else. This may not prove a viable long-term approach, but it is working for the moment.
Tomorrow we meet up with our last companions – my friends Espen and Ragnhild (and their daughter Marie) who are flying down from Oslo for the weekend. It will be great to see them again, the last time I saw them was in 2001 in Norway, and we are looking forward to sharing some better wine than when we were post-grad students together in Brisbane.
hillside looking over a valley filled with similar types of character-ful homes and towards the Medieval city of Grasse, it is three stories of all the Provencal style we could want, inside and out. The terraced gardens have two pools, as well as olive trees, and a couple of stone and wooden outbuildings. All of the rooms are large, spacious, comfortable and have windows opening as doors to the main view. Clearly it is set up mainly for summer, but it is warm and comfortable now – and with the rainy weather of the last few days, a great place to hole up.
Driving around here is interesting, to say the least. The roads are so complex and intricate and just plain weird that any modern town planner would be shot just for thinking of it! I've come to the liberating conclusion that driving around here is much the same as building in Venice – you do whatever you want in front and don't pay the slightest attention to what is happening anywhere else. This may not prove a viable long-term approach, but it is working for the moment.
Tomorrow we meet up with our last companions – my friends Espen and Ragnhild (and their daughter Marie) who are flying down from Oslo for the weekend. It will be great to see them again, the last time I saw them was in 2001 in Norway, and we are looking forward to sharing some better wine than when we were post-grad students together in Brisbane.
Aidan and Lauren are travelling pretty well. They have their ups and downs, and a lot of it is not thqt interesting for them, but they have done well. Lauren has been pretty tempestous, and we are probably not looking forward to the last flights home, but all things considered they have been good and hopefully they have got something out of being dragged aroud the world!
No comments:
Post a Comment