Monaco

We left Nice early on Wednesday to see Monaco and travel to Italy for the first time.

We woke up and took a picture from our rooftop pool (too cold to swim) of the beaches of Nice. In season, this would have been fabulous.

My father suggested that Monaco doesn’t have too much to see and we should try to visit a small medieval town called Eze. As the navigation system took us from Nice to Monaco, we saw a sign for Eze and made the stop for a late breakfast.

The town is at the peak of a stone cliff. Buildings are perched impossibly on the steep edges of the mountain, ready to slide into the sea. It always seems that there is a church with three sides on the edges.

Pictures cannot capture the steep drops you experience from these perches.

I don’t like these edges. Fear of my own clumsiness is really the issue. David has no fear and was reprimanded several times for leaning over iron fences with his feet off the ground.

Even Daphne was taunting me with her arm.

Next we pushed on to Monaco / Monte Carlo. This was tough to explain to the kids. We were visiting a city/country built on tax avoidance (if not evasion) and gambling.

The boys seemed to only see the bigger boats. Here is a picture of the gang in front of the Lady Moura which is the 11^th biggest private boat in the world. On the right.

We visited the oceanic museum where Jacques Cousteau set up his foundation. King Albert I of Monaco was a big believer in protecting the ocean (while hunting ocean creatures) in the beginning of the 20^th century.

We also visited the palace where the prince lives and the church where Grace Kelly was married. The boys were very impressed. Not really.

We ate at a place called Gaston’s and we asked them if they knew who Gaston was in history. Julia said he was a character in Disney’s Ratatouille movie. When we asked if anyone had heard of Monte Carlo, David said there was a Scooby Doo episode with a ghost that haunts a building in Monte Carlo. We are fighting an uphill battle.

Late in the day we left Monaco for the 2-3 hours drive to Genova (birthplace of Christopher Columbus). Considered one of the most beautiful drives in the world, the road follows the coast from small town to small town along the Mediterranean. We had the misfortune to have a driving rainstorm and high winds. This meant that the towering vistas and high bridges were a bit more scary then enjoyable. It was a white knuckle ride with the trucks and scooters flying around in the bad weather.

When we got to our hotel, we were across the street from the harbor where the local town’s men where watching the storm knock the boats about and sink one or two. The hotelier said it was a “typhoon” but that might be a language issue. We watched the storm shred some canvas covers and pull some of the boats from their docks.

Good fun.