nice, france

Since we had been taking all these day trips from Avignon the last couple days and walking from our hotel to the train station everyday, we knew pretty much exactly how long it should take us to get to the station in the morning for us to catch our train to Nice. Because of this we had our things all ready to go and slept in just about as late as we possibly could..hehe. When we got to the station we saw that our train wasn't on the departure board.. what? That was really weird because our train was supposed to depart in about 7 minutes. I pulled out our reservation to double check the time.. and realized our train was leaving from the OTHER station in town.. argh! The stupid thing is that both of us KNEW that, because it was a high speed TGV train, and all high speed trains left from the other station and that was the reason we even needed the reservation in the first place! The other station isn't walkable.. you have to take the shuttle or a taxi. We ran back outside to a waiting cab and asked if he could get us there in 5 minutes. He said no it wasn't possible, but we had to try anyways so we jumped in. He really tried his best to get us there and it was probably the craziest cab ride I've ever taken. He pulled up, slammed on the brakes and we jumped out to grab our packs from the back. I guess he forgot to put on the e-brake on, cause the car started rolling away, and Mike was like "monsieur, monsieur!" lol.. it was such a frantic sight! We were running up to the station just as our train was pulling away. *sigh* Luckily we were able to switch our reservation without having to pay any extra, and we caught the next train, like 15 minutes later. In the end it all worked out, and the 14 Euro cab ride was worth it because if we hadn't taken it we would have missed that second train as well!

When we got to Nice we were delighted to see that they had a Flunch right at the train station (our favourite cheap little buffet restaurant from Paris!) We were so excited! We had a super filling meal and then went to find our hotel. Our hotel was in an awesome location, in the middle of a square and super close to the beach. The lady that ran the place was so nice as well, telling us everywhere we should go and recommending places to shop, even pulling things out of her own wardrobe (she lived in one of the rooms there) and telling me where she had bought them, hehe..

We spent most of our time in Nice relaxing, walking around town and the beach. It wasn't hot enough to lay on the beach or go swimming though which was too bad because the water looked so nice! We saw the Russian Cathedral which was cool and unlike anything we've seen on this trip, and we ate at Flunch everyday, lol. We also spent quite a bit of time shopping for some dressier clothes to wear to Monaco and Monte-Carlo. We put together a couple of nice outfits, quite the change from our usual boring same old clothes we wear over and over again! Both of us also did a complete overhaul of our packs, and sent home a big box each of things we no longer would need and odds and ends we've accumulated so far. It was great to have so much extra room in my bag!