Antibes

Before reading our guidebook yesterday, the only thing I knew about Antibes is that it is located on the French Riviera.  Today, we took the train to get there, and were amazed at the number of boats (including yachts) we saw.  Antibes is the largest yacht marina in the world, with berths for more than 2000 boats.

Like Menton and Nice, Antibes also has an old town, but this one is surrounded by ramparts.  From the ramparts you can look down and see a beautiful sandy beach.  The beach in Nice is very rocky.  You can also see the old buildings typically found in these medieval towns.

For lunch today, I had a pôelée St. Jacques, which I found out was a mixture of fish, chicken, scallops, and vegetables.  I was a little disappointed because I was expecting the protein to be only scallops.  The relatively low price should have been a clue, but I didn't pick up on it.  It came with rice, a small salad, and vegetables in a puff pastry shell.  Bill had grilled sardines.

There were a few confused moments on our walking tour, but not as many as yesterday, and there was much less climbing than yesterday.  All in all, a pleasant day.

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.