Monaco was too strong a draw to resist so off we trotted to the Cote D’Azur. A fabulous journey with stunning views at every turn. We got to the point where we stopped oohing and aahing eventually.
We arrived at the campsite early afternoon and had a welcome rest, though the site was pretty basic. The earliest you could move vehicles was 8.30 so we got ourselves as prepared as we could aiming to be ready to start our engines bang on 8.30 and get in to Monaco, find somewhere to park and enjoy the day.
Our Monaco day was not one of our best, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out it was Friday 13th equivalent in France. A litre of milk spilt over all the piled up bedding, ready to be packed away, meant an hours delay as we made use of the campsites washing machine. When the wash cycle finally finished, unloading the washer revealed a phone wrapped up in the bedding. Oops, it looked pretty terminal as brown goo seeped out of the smashed screen. It’s insured so not the end of the world but pretty inconvenient (if you’re reading this and I haven’t replied to any messages, that should explain it). I am wondering a couple of days later if I’ve had a more relaxing time and engaged more with everyone despite not being able to do the usual area research pre-visit, perhaps a broken phone earlier in the holiday wouldn’t have been so terrible!
We managed to have a lovely rest of the day despite it easily being our clumsiest, if any of us could drop something or trip over something we did. Far from the beautiful people of Monaco, we were the Clampitts from out of town.
A pleasant lunch by the harbour in Fortveille, the next, presumably slightly cheaper, place to moor your many million dollar yacht from the main Monaco bay and then a walk around town.
We’d toyed with the idea of hiring scooters and doing the F1 circuit but with the day we were having decided that was a terrible idea, Ollie didn’t fancy it anyway because scooters are too noisy 🙄. So we walked most of the circuit and discovered we’d covered a fair bit of it whilst looking for a parking space.
I hadn’t realised that the circuit stays on the road all year, so that’s us getting in to pole position about to cross the start line!
Super cars spotted; multiple Ferrari’s, Lamborghinis, Bentleys, Porsche’s, Maserati’s. However as with most french towns there were just as many beaten up old Twingo’s.
Overall a fab day in a fabulous place, I’m not sure we’d do more than a day, probably would break the bank at Kilby towers anyway but the palace is gorgeous, there’s pictures of Grace Kelly and memorials for her which is very poignant and the tunnels under the city are quite an experience with a full road network including roundabouts to navigate.
We headed off to Turin the next morning, the lack of ability to research in advance was telling here. We weren’t really that enthralled with the city but we probably weren’t seeing the best it had to offer.
The best bit for the boys was the lego store that was so quiet you could play with the Lego. Not something they are used to. It’s not one that’s made it to the list to re-visit, I think we may have been heading to a nicer part of town when we accidentally entered the ZTL zone (fine waiting when we get home no doubt) but we’d had enough by then.
The lack of phone also meant the plan to meet at the van in my mind & meet at the park in Si’s mind when the boys wanted to do different things led to a worrying hour with Tom and I waiting at the Van deciding they’d got lost and being on the verge of breaking in to the Van to start driving round searching the city for them before they popped up wondering why we were so pleased to see them. Normal service resumed within about 4 minutes with the boys fighting!
We’d booked a site about 30 minutes outside Turin, one of our favourite stop overs with the friendliest people welcoming us and recommending restaurants we could drive to or offering to organise a takeaway pizza, which we gladly accepted! The end of our spate of misadventures.
I have been determined all holiday to be ready to leave somewhere early in the morning, ideally 8.00, we haven’t got close to it yet but this was finally the day. The promise of Chamonix and a campsite we were really looking forward to getting to that doesn’t take bookings was the motivation we needed. We did it, 8.10 departure with only 2 hours drive to the next destination, part of it through the Mont Blanc tunnel. Finally we were going to arrive somewhere with a whole day to get set up and find our way around.
Our travels, mostly in the van 