Menton - at the Border with Italy

Today we took the hour and a half bus ride from Nice to Menton.  The bus was quite crowded and we had to stand until Monaco when a large group of people got off.  We had a chance to see a long stretch of gorgeous coastline and lots of yachts.  Unfortunately, I made a mistake in calculating when we should get off the bus, which added about a half a mile to our walk into town.  Mention is a very picturesque town on the coast with an Italian flavor.  In fact, I think we heard at least as much Italian spoken as we did French.  Because it was Saturday, the Tourist Office wasn't open so we had to rely on the sketchy map in our guidebook.

We had lunch in a restaurant next to the sea, that had an excellent view.  Unfortunately, the service was the slowest we've experienced in a long time.  But, when the food finally arrived, it was delicious.  Bill had an octopus salad and I had ravioli with cèpes (mushrooms).

























From there we attempted to do the walking tour in our guidebook.  But, the streets are extremely narrow, many of them don't have street signs, and the guidebook can be quite vague.  It was very confusing, but we did come across several beautiful views.

























When we tried to find the old town, things actually got worse.  Once again the guidebook gave ambiguous directions.  We ended up on an extremely steep climb through very narrow streets.  When we reached an overlook, we had a beautiful view of the Menton harbor.  But there were several things mentioned in the guidebook that we just couldn't find.  It was quite frustrating.  Luckily, we managed to find our way back to the bus stop with minimal difficulty.