We had a slow start to the morning, searching for a
coffee and croissant. We eventually plumped for a local bar in Vence where we
had to supply our own pastries from the nearby bakery, but which had a view
that left nothing to the imagination. After, following a lovely level road
which used to be part of the ancient Grasse-Vence one metre railway line, we
arrived at the delightful hilltop town of Tourretttes-sur-Loup. It was impossibly
picturesque.
We had our lunch sitting on a low stone wall
overlooking a rustic chicken coop and the Gorges de la Vesubie. A very amenable
café owner in St-Jean-la-Riviere opened his bar for us to provide our much
needed post lunch espresso which we enjoyed whilst watching the midlife crisis
motorbikes roar past. We then did a very squiggly Monte Carlo stage from Loda
over the Col St-Roch to Luceram. A non rally stage road took us up the valley
of the Redebraus stream which featured some killer hairpins at a place named
aptly, “The Pause”.
On the road above Sospel up the La Bevera valley, we
stopped at the picturesque Notre Dame de la Menour chapel. Then followed the
classic Monte Carlo stage up over the Col de Turini and down to La Bollene. I
shudder to imagine driving this stage flat chat and in snow. We did another
stage from St-Jean-la-Riviere to Levens, before heading back to Nice where we
had a very pleasant dinner on the Promenade des Anglais with an ex-colleague of
Ross, who was doing the European grand tour together with her mother and aunty.
Navigating the one-way street system of Nice was quite a challenge;
particularly after dinner as the co-driver lost interest and snored all the way
back to Vence.
Having spent the previous week in the mountains, as
we neared the Cote d’Azure there was a change in atmosphere, with a subtle perfume
of money in the air. This was most palpable in the medieval hilltop town of St
Paul de Vence, home to artists and aging rock stars and consequently, flooded
with tourists. We eventually found an obscure café for breakfast, with a view
over the Guy Pieters gallery, featuring a 7 m long polished bronze sculpture
“Searching for Utopia” by Dutch artist, Jan Fabre.
Feeling like heretics, we took the freeway the 70
kms along the coast and over the border to the land of good coffee. After our
meeting with the Bugattis earlier in the week, we had toyed with the idea of
dropping in to Monaco for the Historic Grand Prix, but with the experience of
the traffic in Nice the previous evening, we decided to give it a miss. Exiting
the freeway by an extraordinary complex of spiral off ramps at San Remo, we
headed up in to the hills to retrace some classic Rally of San Remo stages. The
first was from San Romolo up to Bajardo, where we discovered an amazing cross
country mini golf course set in the hill overlooking the conical medieval town.
With our panini made by the mamma in the local
salumeria, we lunched on the grassy terrace in front of the ruined church of
San Nicolo, looking out over a magnificent vista of the Ligurian Alps.
We then did a series of San Remo stages from
Apricale to Pigna to Molina di Triora to Rezzo. These roads were incredibly
narrow and twisty, flanked on one side by jagged rock walls and sometimes
nothing on the other. They looked so good on the maps that Ross had to have a
hoon. I enjoy Ross’s spirited driving, but I could never completely banish the
thought that this was a left hand drive car and hence the right side wheels
were not quite where they normally were. On these vertiginous mountain roads,
the consequence of getting it wrong was not just the loss of our hire car
deposit.
We eventually climbed up above the clouds, which
lent an eerie atmosphere to the already spectacular mountain scenery.
Eventually we descended to Albenga where we headed towards Levanto via the high
speed series of viaducts and tunnels which is the autostrada in the steep rocky
coast of Liguria. This trip was punctuated by Katie, our GPS navigation system,
dropping us off the autostrada into an unnecessary detour through the
serpentine backstreets of Genoa.
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