The trip from Lake Maggiore to the Italian Riviera and, finally, the French Riviera, lasted two, incredibly fun-filled days.  We left Baveno and took the A4 headed to Turin and eventually the E717 down toward Savona on the coast.  This route had us passing as close as possible to where Hannibal most likely traveled with his enormous mammalian circus on his way to Rome.  And I thought I had it bad driving this tiny car with 3 sturdy females and a trunk full of luggage!  

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The Italian Riviera is quite different from the French Riviera (Côte d’Azur), although geographically they are extremely close together.  The most noticeable difference, in my opinion, is proximity of the mountains.  In Italy, it feels like the mountains go right up to the coastline.  You drive through a mountain, pop out in a small town and before you know it, you are back in a tunnel going through another mountain.  Often the transition happens so quickly that if you aren’t careful and “look fast”, you can miss the little village entirely.  We developed a system as we progressed down the A10.  One person would look left and the other right as soon as the tunnel ended and they would immediately point out any notable sights.  “Oooh, look at that house up there on the cliff!”  “Wow, there is a massive church steeple!”  “Hey, another waterfall!”  Meanwhile, I just listened to all this talk around me while trying diligently to keep up with the carefree Italian drivers sharing the high-speed motorway.  

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Of course, they aren’t completely different, right?  The beaches are similar – some are sandy lagoons, some are rocky points and some are covered in smooth pebbles of various shapes and sizes that remind me of the river rocks we used in Tucson to channel water.  The towns are similar – a mess of villas, bungalows, palazzos, condos, townhomes and sometimes high-rises, swathed in warm Mediterranean colors and smashed together with tiny streets snaking chaotically in all directions.  And, finally, the people are similar.   The natives are small to midsized, tanned or olive-skinned with dark hair and eyes, suitably fashionably adorned and usually quite friendly and patient.   The tourists are generally the exact opposite in almost every way, usually in possession and use of high-quality technological devices (iphone, camera, Segway) and often flamboyantly parading around all over the place and generally mucking up traffic.  Sometimes, both natives and tourists are like us, driving their vehicles in all directions trying to figure out where they are and how to get where they want to be.  It’s a fantastic collection of sensory experiences.  

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It took all of the first day for us to drive from Baveno to Nice.  On a map, it appears to be such a short distance.  In reality, it might be faster to drive the long way across Tennessee!  We detoured from the A10 right around San Remo.  Remember, the whole goal of this adventure is to experience the world?  So that’s what we decided to do.  See some of the famous Italian coastline, pass through the border at Menton, visit tiny Monaco – the second smallest sovereign state after Vatican City – and, finally, tour a little of Nice, my uncle’s favorite French city, where we were also scheduled to spend the night.  I have been to this section of France at least 20 times in my life but it always takes my breath away.  I love everything about Côte d’Azur.  If time and life allow it, at some future point, I would like to go there with Allita and stay for some weeks so she can explore Nice, Villfranche-sur-Mer, Antibes, Cannes and even Saint Tropez.  But that is for another post altogether.  Allita and I did spend some time visiting the beach just to the south of Nice, near the airport, where she found a tiny conch shell and learned how to skip flat pebbles on the ocean.  

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Thanks to online social networking, I have managed to reconnect with a few very good friends from my teenage years living in Germany and attending the Frankfurt International School.  On the next day of our return trip, I was extremely excited to be able to visit, in-person, with just such a friend who happened to be spending her summer vacation with her family in their Port Grimaud home.  I spent the morning impatiently navigating us along the coastal highway through Cannes, Frejus and finally Sainte Maxime, reminding myself to enjoy the lovely views, point out the interesting and historically relevant sights to Mom and Allita and savor this time with my family, even as I counted down the miles to Port Grimaud.  Here is an important note:  if you are on a tight schedule, do not drive through Cannes.  Even in the middle of a pandemic with tourism at historical lows, traffic was bumper-to-bumper in Cannes and the streets were crowded with pedestrian tourists somehow unable to remain on the walkways.  In addition, whatever progress we might have made was virtually eliminated as our forward progression reduced to a literal crawl when the garbage truck entered the single-lane roadway ahead of us.  Instead of suffering from an anger-induced aneurism, which is a very real possibility when I am stuck in such traffic, I took the time to point out the incredible little shops lining the streets, the lively and vibrant colors of the city, the wide array of architecture and, of course, various and sundry entertaining tourists nearby.  

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After hours of driving along the cost, popping in and out of little coastal towns and marveling over all the amazing sights, we finally found Port Grimaud.  We managed to locate my friend and her family in much the same manner that we located Lake Maggiore, Baveno and our little Italian villa B&B the day prior.  It was a combination of incredible luck and divine intervention.  Ha!  And it was an experience even better than I could have imagined.  I only regret that we couldn’t stay longer and enjoy more time with each other.  Sadly, we were due to arrive at a lovely little gîte in the tiny town of Vauvert right outside Nîmes for the night – about four hours drive away!  The following day was Allita’s 12 birthday.  It was that location she had chosen for us and there that we would start our celebration and the final hours of our trip.  

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