After a surprisingly good night of sleep we grabbed breakfast, checked out, and hit the road. Good bye, Marseilles! It was pretty foggy at first; for you aviation geeks that might read this the French word for fog is brouillard (as in BR in the METARs and TAFs). We saw brouillard warnings all over the signs on the highway.
After driving for a little while we saw signs for St. Tropez. For how celebrity-packed some magazines make it out to be, in the off season it's more of a nice quiet fishing village.
Mark and I parked on a side street and walked down to the water so we could actually touch the Mediterranean.
I'm not sure why I didn't take a picture of this earlier, but this was our rental car. The angle of this picture makes it look a lot bigger than it really is. At any rate, we hopped back in the car and kept heading east.
We passed a few really pretty beaches on the side of the road. This one was just outside St. Maxime. we stopped for a few minutes and climbed down the rocks to check it out.
This is a much better angle of the car. Oh car, so tiny.
We eventually made our way to Cannes, home of the Cannes Film Festival. That big white building is the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, which hosts the festival every year. The carpet this day was black, not red, but we still walked it for fun. They were having some big international trade show and there were people in suits wandering all over the place. What the heck kind of job do you need to have to get sent to something like that?
We wound up grabbing some sandwiches from a vendor and walked out to the water to eat lunch before hopping back in the car. Next stop: Nice! (pronounced like niece)
We made it to Nice just fine and checked into the hotel. I really needed a break by that point, so I hung out in the room while Mark took a walk to see what was nearby. He came back with snacks! There was a bakery around the corner, so he got me a couple macarons. Mmm...macarons...*drool*
We decided to check out the beach by way of Vieux Nice. Those things on the top of the poles are people statues; they lit up different colors at night.
We made our way past a bunch of shops and restaurants and down to the beach. There wasn't any sand; it was all pebbles and the smallest ones were still about the size of an egg.
The Promenade des Anglais stretches all along the beach. There were a ton of people jogging back and forth. If I lived here, I'd probably be doing the same thing!
Looking to the east; the promenade wraps around the corner to the port.
We watched the sun go down over the water while planes took off and landed at the airport in the distance.
We walked down to the port and back. As it started to get dark some of the lights along the path came on. There was a whole section of built in benches looking out over the water.
The promenade all lit up as the sun set.
We were pretty hungry by that point so we started looking for a place to grab dinner. Turns out we found dessert first...oops. There was an amazing Italian gelato place looking out over one of the squares. Mark had strawberry gelato, and that little brown and white round thing was a truffe. It had a hard chocolate shell covered in shredded coconut, and when you cracked it open it had a chocolate ice cream center surrounded by coconut ice cream. It was fantastic; I wish I could get one here.
We did eventually eat real dinner; we wound up at a tourist trap of a restaurant where Mark got about an entire day's worth of food on a plate and I got an incredibly strong drink that tasted the way I'd imagine varnish might taste. The food wasn't bad, though, so we stuffed ourselves, made our way back to the room, and passed out.
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