Wed. 09-12-07 -- Nice, France
This morning we woke up at 9am and didn't get out the door until 10! We stopped by the grocery store (Monoprix) and got food for breakfast and lunch. We walked down the street until we hit the beach, then we sat on a bench and ate our breakfast.
While we ate, an elderly woman sat next to us and said "Bon Appetite." We both chuckled and kept eating. We kind of talked to her about the pigeons that were circling and laughed about it. Only, she spoke in French and we spoke in English! But we each knew what each other was saying, standard small talk about greedy pigeons.
After breakfast, we walked along the beach toward the harbor. The beach alternates between private and public sections. On the private beaches, you have to pay 12 euro for a spot with a chair! However, a chair would actually be nice on these beaches because there is no sand. The beaches are all smooth flat-ish stones about the size of a squashed apple and smaller. It looked pretty, but it doesn't compare to the comfort of sand (more on that later). The sea was SO BLUE! and the water right next to the land was the lightest baby blue because of those light rocks beneath the waves. We had quite a beautiful view as we walked to the harbor.
When we got there, we noticed that the boat tour we were interested in doing leaves at 3pm. As it was only 11:30am, we put our name down and they told us to come back at 2:30pm. While we were at the dock, a SCUBA shack caught our eye, so we decided to check it out... They offered a guided boat dive including all of the equipment for 39 euro. That seemed like a pretty reasonable price, so we went in and talked to them. They had availabilities tomorrow for 9am, so we paid up and got a voucher for tomorrow.
With hours to kill, we walked back toward old town and climbed up Castle Hill, a big stone hill with old fortifications on it. There was quite a bit to see there, plenty of awesome views, some ruins, an old man-made waterfall, etc. We found a nice bench up there and ate our store bought lunch.
We wandered down from the hill on a back way and found ourselves right in old town. We walked around the narrow streets for a while and came across a nice plaza. We bought a crepe filled with chocolate and banana (what is up with us and bananas this trip?!?) and sat down and ate it. We explored old town a while longer but still had an hour to kill so we went to the beach and lay down for a while. We only had our light jackets to lie down on, so we couldn't get too comfortable on the rocks. But we managed, so we soaked up some rays and read our books until it was time to head back to the harbor...
Back at the harbor, we bought our tickets and eventually boarded the boat. The cruise was nice, it was about 1 hour long, and it cruised up and down the coast near Nice. They pointed out the houses of the rich and famous, we saw Elton John's, Sean Connery's, Bill Gates', etc.
After the boat ride, we walked to a bike shop where we rented bikes for an hour. We rode along the coast on the nice wide promenade for about a half hour, then we rode back to get our bikes turned in on time. It was great zipping down the coast on the bikes because we saw a lot of beautiful coastline that we would otherwise have not seen if we were just on foot.
After the bike ride we went to the beach again and hung out there for a while just relaxing. We started getting hungry, so we walked back to our hotel, but stopped by the grocery store. We bought tomato and basil ravioli and a baguette and then cooked it in our hotel kitchenette. It was actually kind of a treat to have a warm meal that we prepared! After dinner, we hit up an internet café for an hour or so and then we went back to our hotel to get a good night's sleep for our dive the next morning.
