I LOVE FRANCE

First Installment: Nice, France

I have been meaning to chronicle my amazing France and Switzerland vacation of August 2014 since the day I left. Alas, time has passed and I must put fingers to keys and bring the adventure back to life.

First we will go to the French Riviera where my oldest son Noah and I began the adventure we had been planning for over a year. 

By some miracle there is a direct flight to Nice from Montreal. While our layover in Montreal was 9 hours, at least we didn’t have to stop somewhere in the middle of the night. 

Landing early in Nice we were a tad jet lagged, weighed down by luggage (mostly mine), hot, and unsure of how to get to the hotel. 

We started the trip thinking we were going to conserve dollars, thus we had agreed to take the bus to the hotel. I don’t know, didn’t seem that cheap and the driver didn’t speak much English, but somehow we managed to pick out enough words to get off at the right stop ... sort of. But you walk everywhere anyway, unless you want to brave that ridiculous traffic, so it was perfect happiness to trudge through town, sweaty and tired, with our luggage. 

Allow me to take a brief pause here and explain, “why Nice?” and “why Noah?”. In 2011 my husband and my youngest son, Nick, took a Mediterranean cruise and one of our stops was in Cannes, right next door to Nice. We loved Cannes. We fell in love with France on that trip. When I sent Noah a picture of Nick’s lunch in a Facebook message, Noah wrote back, “new souvenir request: France”. And three years later I was able to honor that request. 

The deal was, I bought the airline tickets and hotel and car and he bought his own food and adventure. He ended up helping out with gas and some other things too, for which I was grateful. 

Because France is expensive. 

At the beginning, where we spent our first two days in Nice, we took little care, other than the bus ride, on how much we spent and proceeded to eat our way through the town. It wasn’t until we landed in Switzerland a week later that we took to going to the grocery store and eating sack lunches. 

FYI - if you ever go to Switzerland, plan on spending a lot of money. On every single tiny thing you purchase. If you have a problem with this, don’t go. Just be happy and spend money. I was able to overcome this dilemma and had a great time.  

But I digress. We are still in France. Nice to be exact. We are barely at the hotel. Which was awesome. 

Our room wasn’t quite ready so we headed to the roof, where there is a pool, and looked out upon the amazing Mediterranean Sea.

I have lived in Michigan all my life, growing up near the great lakes, spending weeks and weeks of my childhood on Lake Michigan swimming in the icy water, exploring the lake and the rocks and the beach and the woods. And I plan to retire on the shore of Lake Superior someday. 

I love the clear, cool (ok, cold) lake water. I love the stillness on a summer day; the stars on a cloudless night. I love the wild of the upper peninsula and the gusting winds that come off the shore of that great lake. Rock hunting with my friend Debi who knows the shores so well. 

Yet despite my love for the great lakes Michigan and Superior, my favorite body of water on this planet, that I have met thus far, is the Mediterranean Sea. 

The Mediterranean Sea has a volcanic bottom, which means there isn’t much sand. This makes the water sparkle with color, changing from aqua to cobalt blue and so clear you can see into the depths beyond measure. 

Mists come off the sea constantly, rendering the air a special character of light; lavender and peach. And mysterious.

We had a couple $14 euro each drinks on the roof and decided to walk to the beach and swim. Noah was all hot to get a moped (we hadn’t even checked into our rooms yet) but finally he joined me at the beach, where he found me asleep on the rocks. Eventually I talked him in to going into the water. Then I couldn’t get him out. 

The beach in Nice mesmerizes me. It is made of rounded stones of varying sizes. The sound of the waves as they come in and out is like nothing I have heard, water and air rustling over the stones, back and forth. So soothing to the spirit. 

The waves were totally there for us. We stayed in the water forever just floating up and down on the swells about 20 feet from shore. We kind of had to be sure we were ready when we got out because it was a bit of an ordeal to clamber up the stony cliff shaped by the waves, oochy ouchy on the feet. 

Finally our room was ready and we checked in, changed, and began our assault on the French Riviera. Noah got his moped and I explored the town.

In front of our hotel was a promenade. It was the coolest thing! Every few minutes a hundred water fountains would erupt out of the cobbled surface into the sky. Children as well as adults played in these fountains all day long. It was quite a sight and lasted into the night. 

Day two was pretty much a repeat with the addition of a shopping trip and an exploration up to the top of the promontory first thing in the morning before it got hot. The view of the city to the East was beautiful. We saw people snorkling in the deep water. We saw the marina. We saw airplane after airplane land and take off from the airport. We took an evening stroll on the stony beach and breathed in the sultry summer air of the Mediterranean. 

I love France. It is my favorite place in the world. Happily, almost everyone in the French Riviera speaks English because our “French phrase book” never really left the bag. 

We learned about French wines from a wine seller. We learned that the restaurant owners could tell in seconds that we didn’t speak French when they quickly handed us menus in English. We learned that French is a fun language and thus the people are a happy lot. They make terrific food and live amongst beautiful scenery every day. 

The morning we left for northern France we had a delicious breakfast of cappuccino and salmon at a cafe. 

Next installment: Chamonix in the French Alps.