Farnsniente

Principally Monaco (with some Èze)

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in
📍 Monaco

Photos

Trip index

Summary

Drive to Èze. Very picturesque but very crowded with tourists. Great views to the Mediterranean. Crazy drive to Monaco. One week before the Grand Prix of Monte Carlo, so the racecourse is laid out and all the grandstands have been built. Grabbed a quick lunch and then walked over to look at the yachts in the boat basin. Drove to Saint Jean Cap Ferrat to visit the Ile de France Villa of Baroness Beatrice de Rothschild . Audio tour of house then gardens. To Nice, walked Old Town then to Panama Restaurant for early dinner.

Details

Our plan is to drive up to Èze today, a very picturesque, popular hilltop village. It’s only 11 miles away but will take 45 minutes. So many twists and turns. We get there and park. The city garage is shiny, new, and enormous, having many floors on which to accommodate many, many cars. What can it mean? We take the elevator way up to the ground floor and start heading up towards the village proper. We’re not alone. 

It is picturesque but all pictures will, necessarily, contain lots of people. It’s only April but the place is packed. We hear lots of English, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, and of course French. The narrow ancient “roads” are all just for pedestrians, as it was back a few hundred years ago when the place was quieter. The paths go up and down, and loop back on themselves, so with each turn we seem to encounter some big family or group we saw just a few minutes prior. It reminds me of the M. C. Escher drawing with stairways going all different ways with the walkers ignoring the pull of gravity. 

We escape to the cemetery where we encounter just as many people but they’re all buried. Their best  faces are on oval plaques remembering who is here. Some of the names are French but many more seem to be Italian or Spanish. 

As nice as Éze might be, it’s much too crowded now and we can’t get out of there fast enough. We feel bad for the poor people who still live there. I guess it’s their living now. Hopefully in the later afternoon and evening it clears out and they get a little bit of peace and quiet, time when they can relax and clean up the trash from the day’s visitors and restock the shelves for tomorrow. 

Our watches say it’s getting on towards lunch and we ponder our options. Monaco isn’t far away and is a strong draw for the group. Surely we can find a good place to eat lunch there. 

The drive to the principality is easy enough until we get there, where it turns into an automotive version of the Chutes and Ladders game, albeit with tunnels and roundabouts. We go in the direction we think we should until the signs leave us wondering. At times we take advantage of the ability to go around a roundabout more than once to decide in which way we should be going. Amusingly the car in front of us is doing the exact same thing. On the positive side we have GPS. On the negative side we’re below ground, in a tunnel, and we’ve only paid for cellphone service in Italy and France. One of the tunnels is a long, sweeping arc going slowly around, down and down, until we’re out of the hills and down to near sea level. We’re plopped out back into the daylight and quickly scramble to find one of those blue signs with a big white P on it (for Parking). We’re ready to be rid of our car for a while. 

Walking again we find a likely place for lunch and install ourselves. We get to choose between French, Italian, English or probably other languages. Satiated we set out to see how the prince lives. Apparently the Monaco Grand Prix will be going on in about a week and the race track and stands are all in place, with fancy chain link fences all around, limiting who can get in and where. The signs lead us to the “boat basin” where we see some of the biggest and fanciest yachts we’ve seen. We laugh at the clever names on the boats, giving our prize to the modest craft with “DonQuiFlotte” on the back. 

Ready to be back in France we reclaim our car and head back uphill. We’re going to the former residence of one of the nieces of the banking family Rothschild. Beatriz found this big, flat plot of land overlooking Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. She then invested a lot of the money at her disposal (a mountain of it) to build a very nice “house” and “gardens”. Thankfully over time the property was turned over to a foundation which found lots of benefactors to maintain it and fix it up. It’s as lovely as ever and the gardens are amazing. They cover a lot of ground and as interested as Beatriz was in collecting valuable art, she was in collecting unique plants, not from here. The plants liked the climate as much as we humans and have thrived. It’s a sight to behold. 

Having had as much of the Lifestyles of the rich and famous as we can take we head back the short distance to Nice for dinner. We park the car and head to the Panama restaurant on the Place Garibaldi for dinner. It’s good and soon we’re back home, enjoying our VRBO for one last night. 

Photos

[Note: to view the photos in chronological order, start at the bottom :-/ ]

Dinner at Panama was good, foie gras, grilled peppers, burrata with basil and cherry tomatoes.
Out towards the Mediterranean we can see more boats, toys of the rich.
A banyan tree, over the years, appears to have figured out how to get more roots down to more places.
The girls, as always, appreciated the roses.
Exotic is one of the stipulations for plants in the gardens, including lots of healthy succulents.
The gardens don’t disappoint and we tip our hats to the busy gardeners who keep it looking so nice.
Inside we have an included audio tour and we find out what life was like back then, if you had oodles of money. In reality we have it pretty good today (many of us).
Next stop is a house and its gardens. A really nice house with some awesome gardens.
In departing from Monaco our route took us onto the future race course of the Monaco Grand Prix, coming up a few weeks hence. I was wondering what the top speed of our BMW might be.
One of the funner parts of owning a boat is coming up with the name. For our money this modest boat was the overall winner.
We figure out that not all reflections will make good group selfie opportunities.
There were some darn big, nice looking boats, er, yachts in the boat basin in Monaco. Where we saw people on the boats many were just eating lunch. They eat their food just like the rest of us, one scoop of caviar at a time.
In the cemetery in Èze we could see the smiling faces of those who came before us, and try to figure out from where they originally came (maybe the Netherlands, in this case?)
The many flowers added to the local color.
Of course, being the mediterranean, with its mild climate, all plants want in on this “blooming” thing, including this palm tree.
It does not take long before Èze starts feeling like an M C Escher drawing.
We quickly get the answer to “how in the heck do they get goods and inventory and furniture in and out of here??” They have motorized wheelbarrows. Hey, Ron, do I need one of these?
A map of the medieval village of Èze, very twisty-turny with lots of ups and downs.
Out of the multi-story underground parking garage in Èze, I pass what appears to be a 100s year old olive tree in a planter. Must be nice.
On our drive out of Saint-Paul-de-Vence we again pass another ‘head’ building. I guess the locals didn’t want to be outdone by Nice. Or maybe the two cities got a volume discount.
Up early to start our day, I have yummy French baguette, with French butter but we have no jam. Thankfully the picture perfect strawberries, in all their sweetness, fit the bill to a T.