Nice and Nicer

Well, it’s been a little while. Put it down to some dodgy internet connections and not enough time in the one place…

We left Aix last Monday, in little Sophie the

Citroen, for the drive back to Nice. Being the intrepid travellers that we are, we decided to take the Carnadel du Roy from the hills between Toulon and St Tropez down to the coast. 11 kilometres of the steepest, winding-est road on the planet, carved into the side of cliffs with about enough room for oneand a half cars to comfortably pass each other at most points. The views of the Riviera from up there are just amazing, however, and made it worth the white knuckles we both (well ok, I) had by the end of the drive.

From there we bypassed St Tropez and after a small detour into Cannes headed straight into Nice where after several attempts to back the car into a very narrow parking spot and some help from a very charming old man, we bid au revoir to Sophie and headed back to the dreaded hotel, where this time they were charming and witty and our room was actually both available and very nice.

The hotel we were staying in has its own little piece of beach, with a very lovely bar and restaurant on the beach, where we had drinks each evening and a very beautiful dinner on the first night.

We had both managed to forget to bring along our swimming costumes, but figured that finding a new one would not be a problem in an enormous resort town like Nice. So after managing to get our laundry done (oh joy!) on our first morning there, we set off to Galleries Lafayette to find something suitable. No chance. There was a most extraordinary array of teeny weeny bikinis and amazingly expensive (and pretty ugly) one pieces, but nothing even remotely suitable. After venturing into a few other shops which were already teaming with winter woollies, we gave up on our dreams of swimming in the Mediterranean and moved on to Monte Carlo.

We had intended to spend a morning in Monaco and head back to Nice in the afternoon. The Lonely Plant gave us a few clues on some things to do there but I thought it a little strange that there was no Grace Kelly museum listed there, so I didwhat any resourceful traveller would do and googled. (Grace has always been one of my style icons…) And while I found that there is in fact no Grace Kelly museum in Monaco, as it happened the Grimaldis were hosting an exhibition of never-seen-before artefacts that had come out of palace archives and were drawn together from a whole lot of other places in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Grace’s death. The exhibition had been on for a couple of months and as it happened was finishing three days after we were due to leave France.

So the plan WAS to spend an hour or so there, wander around Monte Carlo for a bit and then head back to Nice. The plan was thwarted, however, by how enormous and amazing the exhibition was. For it seems that Grace was a hoarder. She had kept the most extraordinary array of bits and pieces, like scrapbooks from her childhood and then as she moved into her film career, little handwritten notes from people like Cary Grant and Truman Capote, and they were all on display in the most extraordinarily well designed exhibition that either of us have ever seen, and as museum junkies that says quite a bit. There were about 30 letters to and from Alfred Hitchcock, annotated film scripts, notes written by Prince Rainier to Grace when she was on the boat coming across from the US to Monaco for the wedding, letters to and from Jackie Kennedy-Onassis around the time of JFK’s assassination, about 50 of her dresses on full display and another 100 or so hanging in a giant wardrobe room. They had the wedding dress (which belongs to a museum in Philadelphia that Grace donated it to after the wedding) in a most extraordinary display where it was completely enclosed behind glass, but with mirrors positioned so that you got a 360^o view. I could really go on and on about the exhibition but that’s probably enough – you get the picture. We emerged three hours after we went in, having pretty much rushed ourselves, and skipped over a few of the rooms.

The rest of Monte Carlo was a bit dull by comparison. We went and checked out the casino (from the outside) and wandered around a bit before heading back to Nice.

Bright and early the next morning we headed off to Milan, but that’s another tale for another day…