Best Day of Hiking Ever

Our forecasted sunny day dawned, and we headed back over to the Lauterbrunnen Valley (only a 15 minute drive) to take the cable car up to Murren, another car free, mountain town, this time on the opposite side of the valley. Hikes from Murren provide the views of the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau. On our trip the previous day to Wengen, we'd actually hoped to hike a ridge line on a walk reputed to be one of the best in the region...only to find the route was still closed due to snow...in June. Not something we expected, but at an elevation of 7000 feet, we should have. We wanted to do a walk called the North Face Trail from Murren - actually, from yet another "town" (hamlet) a cable car ride up from Murren. Stopping in at Murren's Tourist Office, we found that one part of the North Face Trail was open - not the one we'd planned to hike, but we'd take what we could get. Riding the cable car up even higher, we stepped off at Alpenhubell and into glorious mountain views. The Jungrau mountain was front and center, right in our faces, the entire hike.

I'm 26 weeks along here.

Switzerland has these handy, yellow, directional signs that point your way toward towns, toward specific hikes, etc. Sometimes they just say "Wanderweg," which means walking trail. While these little signs are normally quite helpful, the North Face Trail signs gave us some confusing moments. The trail has a few split offs where you can walk to different towns, walk a different trail down, and so on. The trail we were following ended, or so we thought, at the front door of a house. We thought we'd missed the trail and gotten on a long driveway, so we backtracked, picked a different split, and that trail just petered out fairly quickly. Our only other option was to follow yet another split that headed up. We did not want to go up, so we headed back down the "driveway," and in walking on and over the front doorstep to peek around the corner, found the trail did in fact continue...along the side deck of the house, down some stairs, and then back on the real trail again.

We reached Murren in the amount of time the trail signs had listed (oh yeah, those handy walking signs also list distances and/or hiking times to the destination - so efficient!), and we were quite proud of ourselves since we've tended to become slow pokes. Although we had aching feet, we were just not ready to give up those views and call it a day, so we headed out from Murren on a family friendly trail (mostly flat and mostly paved) to the next village down the mountain, where we could catch the cable car down to the valley and our car. This second trail had views of all three of the biggies in this mountain world, and we had a slow pace with lots of stops for "photos" (i.e., rest). Even now, when I look back over our photos, I cannot get over the beauty of this region. Nathan called this his best day of hiking ever...high praise indeed.

Finding Paradise

Back to our vacation that now seems like it was eons ago, we based ourselves in the small town of Grindelwald, the next valley over from Lauterbrunnen Valley. We loved the town, and while a couple of the guidebooks I read listed it as crowded and touristy and kitschy, we found it to be a lovely, friendly town with plenty of restaurants from which to choose, some nice places to sit and enjoy the mountain views, and very friendly people staffing the hotels, restaurants, and shops. With our three day trip, we mostly planned to do hiking and hoped to do one day trip, possibly to Lucerne, as well.

This area of Switzerland is what you see on postcards and brochures. Towering, snow-covered, Alpine mountains and gorgeous, green valleys with wood chalets dotting the landscape. At this time of year (early June), waterfalls cascade down all the mountains and hills. The most famous mountains of this area are the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau, with a nice little legend to keep their order straight - The Ogre (Eiger) is kept away from the Maiden (Jungfrau) by the Monk (Monch). The Jungfraujoch at the top is heralded as the Top of Europe because it's the highest railway station in Europe, reached by railway and cable car. Servicing the valleys in this region are comprehensive, clean, scenic combinations of trains, cog rails, and cable cars. And Switzerland is EXPENSIVE! To go to Jungfraujoch costs something like $200. Some of the other, most scenic cable car routes were $100 and up per person. Since we just wanted to do some walking, we decided we'd get great views wherever we were and we could skip seeing the best of the best, i.e., heading to the tops of the mountains. And we were not disappointed.

Doesn't  the Lauterbrunnen Valley look like utter Paradise!

Our first morning dawned a bit cloudy, so we headed to Trummelbach Falls, a place where tunnels are carved out of the mountainside, and you can see various waterfalls of the glacier melt from the Eiger, Monch, and Jungfrau. They are beautiful and thundering and we spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the camera to capture the beauty.

Then the sun came out and we headed up a mountain via cog rail to visit the car-free, mountain town of Wengen. Sadly, we found out after our return home, when Nathan posted photos on Facebook, that some military friends from long ago were staying in Wengen that exact day! What are the odds? We did not run into our friends - instead, we took a short walk through town, then headed down to the valley and our car via a hike down rather than the railway. The hike was a bit steeper than I expected in some places (not in the below photo!), and with my center of gravity having shifted to the front a bit, I had to take more care than usual on the steeper parts. But our walk was filled with great views, and we enjoyed picking out the beautiful chalets that would work for our vacation home. The hike down from Wengen just whet our appetite for more of those views, and with a sunny day forecasted next, we were looking forward to Day 2 in the Swiss Alps.

I Interrupt This Program -

Lots going on this summer, and still to come on the blog is the Swiss finish to our vacation, a girl's trip to Istanbul, a quick visit to Sicily, and reporting on the Summer o' Beach (meaning we do a lot of lying about on various beaches). But I'm interrupting the more exciting, trip type stuff to report on Baby news. Actually, Baby gear. I got my shipment of stuff yesterday, most of it given or loaned to me by my sister, mom of three. The military provides us with a fantastic benefit when we live overseas of one shipment of baby gear. There are, or course, several rules, but we qualified. This means new moms (the allowance is only available to first time parents) can get the stuff they actually want, rather than being dependent on our very, very expensive choices out in town or our limited, but more economical, choices on base.

Nathan and I have spent the past few years trying to declutter. I'm worse at it than Nathan, but neither of us has been completely successful. And what do babies bring? Clutter. Stuff. More stuff. Stuff that multiplies and gets bigger as they get bigger. I think we're both having nightmares of drowning beneath piles of baby gear. To that end, we kept our baby shipment small. We have just the basics. The basics do not extend to Baby's clothing. See the picture? That is one out of 8 or 9 loads of laundry and only includes what my sister is loaning me - it does not include the stuff we've already bought or received as gifts. When my baby goods arrived yesterday, the clothes, including lots of blankets and some very bulky type items for cold weather, all fit nicely into two plastic tubs and one additional box. Then I made the mistake of opening those tubs and soon, Scully and I found ourselves trapped under piles of baby clothes that were multiplying like little Gremlins. Scully was running scared - his world is about to be completely rocked.

I can see my future now, and it has made me run, not walk, to Pinterest for every organizing tip in the book. Our biggest problem is that while we live in a decent size house, we have NO closets. This is Europe, people. No closets. We have a cantina with wonderful shelving...and everything in the cantina grows mold. We have a closet in our garage. When it rains, is it's wont to do all winter long, that closet streams water down it's walls...which equals mold. So where to turn? Under the bed space, which is all currently in use. Wardrobes, ditto. The key is to aggressively weed out belongings (please note, the key is not to cut down on baby clothes. Baby clothes are cute, and from what I hear, babies vomit a lot, so lots of clothes are actually necessary, esp to people who have a fickle dryer). So I dive into closets and wardrobes with every intent of throwing out things like the cigar boxes I bought six years ago when we were stationed in Key West, but then I realize all the things cigar boxes are good for...like storing tiny baby things. I study my shoe organizers and contemplate getting rid of some of my high heels, but I'm just not ready to face the fact that, since I stumble when wearing heels without a baby in my arms, my high heel days will be disappearing for the next several years. So I turn to my purses, which Nathan believes I could easily cut down. He is incorrect. I use all my purses, except for the bright red, leather, triangle tote that is so gorgeous. I have used it once, and I looked fabulous. The rest of the time it sits neatly organized on my purse shelf making me happy. But me thinks when one has a baby, one does not get a neatly organized purse shelf, or even a neatly organized purse. One gets an ugly, plastic-like, humongous diaper bag to carry around yet more baby stuff. In February, when I was visiting my sister, we went to a consignment store, and I found a very pretty, Coach tote bag that I thought would work perfectly as a diaper bag. My sister just laughed and laughed. Apparently, Scully isn't the only one about to have a rocked world.

Amazing Annecy

I was trying to do some blogging on the go during this vacation, so you may remember our sheer delight in picking Annecy off the map as our lunch stop and happening onto an incredibly beautiful city. I wanted to share just a little more about Annecy (pronounced Ahn-see), on the shore of Lake Annecy and rimmed by Alps. We drove to the lake and parked there, right by the pedestrian zone of town, and then enjoyed a too short wander through town while seeking out our cheese, bread, and sausage for lunch picnic. The restaurants and streets were filled with tourists, as well they should have been. A favorite was, of course, the Palais de l'Isle, which is the building featured in my prior post (Travel Can Remain Surprising). The Palais de l'Isle was a residence built in the 1100s, and subsequently served as a courthouse, mint, jail, and now, a local museum.

I couldn't resist adding another photo of Palais de l'Isle.

Annecy's streets and alleys meandered through buildings and over the canal, winding about, and we had to tear ourselves away for picnic time. We found a lovely, small store that held everything we needed for our picnic and made our way to the lakeside park. Oh, how that park soothed our green space deficit eyes. Naples has a ton of great things about it. Parks are not one of them. There are very few green spaces, and what few there are can take quite a trip to reach. To sit by the huge lake, covered by shade trees, and staring up at the Alps while eating our lunch was heaven. But, we eventually had to tear ourselves away and finish out the drive...Swiss Alps or bust.

Annecy had a number of boat rental options. Canoes, kayaks, motorboats, paddle boats. The paddle boats had interesting options of colorful lounge chairs, and some even sported a small waterside - awesome!

A Few Of My Favorite Things

So you already know just how much I loved the French markets. I enjoyed not just the browsing and people watching, but taking photos of the stalls. So today is a photo day...some of my favorite photos of market stalls:

Cotes du Rhone Wine Road

Buis-les-Baronnies, best market award - helped along
by the fact that our hotel is in one of those buildings on the right.

Picnic cherries

We spent our final day in France first at the fabulous, weekly market right outside our hotel room door - who would have guessed that our tiny, little village home base would have such a nice market. And like many small towns, it's quirky citizens were easy to spot. One night while eating, a bearded man galloped into town on his horse, followed by a pack of dogs. We saw his dogs again, but missed another episode of horse play. The market in Buis-les-Baronnies netted us a few gifts, both for others and ourselves, and following yet another picnic lunch by yet another river, we spent our final afternoon visiting wineries, ala the Rick Steves guidebook for driving the Cotes du Rhone Wine Road. Nathan and I had a bit of a miscommunication in wine buying expectation - I thought we'd pick up a few bottles, while Nathan planned to pick up a few cases. With a total of five vineyards and/or cave(s) (pronounced kah-vay) visited, Nathan's plan took over the entire back end of our station wagon. Our cantina is now well stocked!

Our driving tour views

A favorite stop was our final one, which we reached just at 5pm - Domaine du Marchon. With a plan to do a quick tasting, then return to the local village of Seguret for dinner, we walked into the tasting room and were greeted with, "Are you here for the tour?" Ummmm...yes? Turns out that Wednesdays at 5pm is the tour (in English - owners are Scottish) of the vineyard. We tramped up to the vineyard and learned about the soil of the region and the classification of Provencal wines - this is just what Nathan was wanting as he'd commented on the afternoon drive that he'd like to begin learning more about French wines.  We headed back into the winery to learn about the production side of things, and then on to the tasting room. I can't tell you much about French wine as I was paying only marginal attention. I was very distracted by our other tour group members, one a set of eight or so young people (college age). I won't go into detail as it would be rude - oh, okay, it's because it was the most unattractive group of people I've seen in a long time. I mean really, really unattractive - distractingly unattractive. And one girl had selected as her outfit a completely see-through top over her black bra, so I spent a lot of time pondering today's fashion and considering just how out of touch I must be. Then there was another guy, American, who seemed to know everything about French wine and kept handing out brochures for a gorgeous hotel. Nathan talked to him following the tasting and we found that he'd recently purchased said hotel and was at the vineyard to stock his restaurant. Anyone would have been distracted by all these interesting people, except Nathan, who was focused on actually learning about wine. Domaine du Marchon provided, by far, the most comprehensive tour and tasting we've ever attended, and it was one of the most enjoyable. Our final day in Provence was the perfect end to our exploration of the region. We saw beaches, mountains, markets, old towns, new towns, ruins, wineries, and took full advantage of our love for the French cuisine...which meant we had to plan on hiking off all the extra calories at our next destination, the Swiss Alps.

Old Towns, New Towns, Markets, and Ruins

Notice the Roman bridge on the right side of the picture

Vaison-la-Romaine is a quite popular town in our new region of Provence, and has a large, weekly market. We grew to enjoy a morning browse through the Provencal markets, so we drove over early to Vaison-la-Romaine as we'd read parking could become a challenge. While we found parking quite easily, we were so grateful to have arrived early because by mid-morning, the market was so crowded as to be unenjoyable as well as stifling hot in the maze of streets that blocked any breeze. This market was our least favorite - I think that because of it's size, the quality of goods was diluted. There were many more booths of what "cheap crap," so we had to hunt a little harder for the fun stuff, including our picnic lunch fixings. We had more of a late breakfast picnic just to escape the growing crowds and found ourselves sitting by a clear, rushing river just downstream from a Roman bridge built about 2000 years ago. What is remarkable about it is that a 1992 flood washed away all the modern bridges in the valley. Guess which bridge was left standing? As we explore so many incredible buildings and structures in Europe, from bridges to palaces, my engineer husband is constantly remarking on how we can't build things like this bridge anymore - I'm sure I've written about this before. Either we don't have the techniques, the skilled craftsman to do the quality handwork, or, most importantly, the money. Vaison-la-Romaine's bridge makes the point perfectly. We dawdled by the river for awhile watching a lady play with her dog while we lounged about eating cherries (fresh, market cherries - so, so yummy), then decided we'd best do at least a little sightseeing.

Just in case you've
never seen a squat toilet

Vaison-la-Romaine reportedly has some wonderful, Roman ruins in the New Town. We skipped those and opted for a climb up to the medieval, hill town. There, I found my one and only squat toilet. I'd been concerned that many of the public toilets I'd find in France would be such things, but so far, France had gifted me with numerous, easy to find, free, clean, stocked with tp and soap, public toilets. Medieval Vaison-la-Romaine is where I met my fear. At 26 weeks pregnant and a belly that had popped, I had grave concerns that squatting down to the floor would result in me not being able to get back up without some hand and knee placements in spots I'd rather not have any skin touch. But also at 26 weeks, sometimes bathroom breaks become vital. This is already too much detail, so let's just say that things worked out and I remained clean.

Back on the road, we headed to Orange to see the Roman theatre there, supposedly one of only three in the world with the acoustic wall still standing. A couple of fun facts on Roman theatre, one of which is more gruesome than actually fun:  (1) In plays, if a character was to be killed, a condemned prisoner would take the place of the actor at the last minute and actually be killed on the stage, and (2) the first Italian drama was developed right here in Campania (here as in our home, Campania, Italy, not Orange, France). Orange was a wonderful town. Bustling, with a large, newer town surrounding the old town, we would have liked to do some more exploring...but relaxing back at our hotel garden sounded more appealing to our aching feet on this very hot day, and this trip was all about skipping the high powered sightseeing and spending time relaxing.

Exploring the Luberon

Pretty street in Roussillon

Le Colorado de Rustrel

Our next day in the region was for visiting nearby Roussillon (my original pick for our home base), the ochre cliffs of Le Colorado Rustrel, Mont Ventoux (of Tour de France frame), and ending up in our next home base of Buis-les-Baronnies to visit the Luberon region of Provence. Roussillon is startlingly attractive and quite different from every other quaint village we've seen in Europe in that it sits atop huge quantities of ochre, and all of the buildings in town have the ochre color. I'm not sure if they're made of ochre bricks or if the ochre is used to create a paint or plaster. We enjoyed a nice wander through the small town, gave thanks that we'd landed in busier, pretty Isle-sur-la-Sorgue as our home base, and headed out of town to Le Colorado de Rustrel, a park with lots of sandy paths among the ochre colored cliffs and rocks.

Mont Ventoux

From Roussillon, we headed toward Nathan's must-see sight in Provence, the top of Mont Ventoux, which I believe is used sometimes as the final point on the Tour de France route or is used as a Tour stage. Climbing out of the valley filled with lavender fields (and pulling over for a quick look at a working sheepdog herding some wayward sheep back across the road to the flock), we passed through a nice forest that thinned out to become a completely bald, mountaintop resembling the surface of the moon. Just white, limestone rocks everywhere. And at over 6000 feet, it's COLD at the top. We went from the Colorado de Rustrel, where we were guzzling water and had to sit in the car with the A/C running to recover from our hike, to Mont Ventoux, where I was pulling on jackets and wrapping a scarf around my bared legs.

Beautiful Buis-les-Baronnies

We ended up in Buis-les-Baronnies, a tiny, tiny village and one in which I was very apprehensive. This was to be our longest stay so far at three nights, and after spending nights in a town filled with restaurants, yummy ice cream parlors, and a beautiful river to walk along, I thought we might be bored silly in Buis-les-Baronnies. Wrong, wrong, wrong. We booked into Hotel Arcades de Lion d'Or, a lovely hotel in the Old Town - aka, the town since the only parts of town not in the "old" section were a few small stores and gas station on the road leaving town. Our hotel was so full of character with a room that felt like visiting a friend's home, a view of the Old Town and the weekly market out our window, and a beautiful, relaxing garden and pool (and hot tub and sauna, which we never used) to lounge in after our days of exploring. We found a restaurant on the edge of town with tables overlooking a scenic, mountain vista and a menu so appealing that we returned the following evening to try more of their food. Plus, nearing the end of a full week of traveling meant we welcomed some quieter, more slow-paced evenings.

Our hotel's relaxing garden

A favorite photo from Roussillon

Happy Accident

Since planning of this trip happened so late in the game, most of the towns where I actually wanted us to stay were out of hotel options. So we ended up in surrounding towns, and in every case, we were delighted upon visiting the "first choice" town to find it much lacking compared to where we were actually staying. The first of these "accidents" landed us in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, perhaps the prettiest, little town we visited. Isle-sur-la-Sorgue was our home base for two nights in the Vaucluse region of Provence. The town is adorable, built atop canals for it's 13th century, flour mill industry that later added textile and paper mills. Once hosting over 70 waterwheels, today, there are only a few left.

Isle-sur-la-Sorgue's main canal on Market Day - lots of picnicking

Isle-sur-la-Sorgue's claim to tourist fame is it's antique stores and weekly, antique market. From Monday-Saturday, numerous antique stores inhabit stores on the canal. Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is said to have the best antiques selection outside of the fabulous, antique markets in Paris. On Sunday, the market takes over the entire town, with antiques on one side of the main canal, and the rest of town holding the more typical, market wares. And by "rest of the town," I mean the entire town becomes a market. We were enthralled...and hot. Thankfully, with Isle as our home base, we could head back to our hotel for breaks. Isle-sur-la-Sorgue is also where we figured out the best way to lunch in France is a picnic of market foods picked up in the morning and a pretty, shady lunch spot to enjoy it by noon. We typically found some type of soft, but pasteurized, cheese (the cheese sellers were excellent about pointing us to pasteurized cheeses that I could eat), fruit (cherries were our favorite pick), a baguette, and some type of sausage. And of course, a couple of light pastries.

Charming, tiny Gordes

We also headed over to explore the hilltop village of Gordes. Filled with buildings of stacked stone, the little village sounded like a wonderful visit. And it was, for an hour or so. We walked into town, took in the two or three streets that make up the village, and headed "home" to our small, but still vibrant, town. Gordes was a quiet visit with a couple of cafes, while Isle-sur-la-Sorgue has a river to walk along, ducks to watch as they surf the river currents, numerous cafes and restaurants and shops, and enough people to feel vibrant without feeling overcrowded.

Love, love, love French stores - how beautiful is this display!

One of my favorite antique store finds

Me, enjoying the antique market in Isle-sur-la-Sorgue...and
carrying around our lunch baguette

French Grand Canyon

Leaving the Cote d'Azur to make our way to Provence, we took the scenic route through Le Grand Canyon du Verdon, considered to be Europe's prettiest canyon at 15 miles long and almost half a mile deep. At the bottom, a river the color of jade winds throughout. Before reaching the canyon we had a fun stop by turning in at a sign indicating a cheese seller. Driving down an increasingly rutted, dirt road about half a mile, we finally reached a run down farm with animals everywhere - dogs were everywhere, cows, goats, and rabbits behind fences, and a movie worthy farmer selling large amounts of cheese to a couple of men. Nathan managed to get across to the farmer that he'd like some goat cheese, and off we trundled into the cheese room, where it was clear to me that I would not be eating any of the cheese we bought (but Nathan said it tasted fabulous). Our farmer was so sure that we understood his language that he kept up a rapid fire speech the entire time of our visit, little of which we actually understood. I really wish I'd taken the camera out of the car and asked the farmer for a picture. I'm pretty sure it would have been one of our more treasured trip photos.

To unwind from the excitement of the cheese farm, we slowly drove along the rim of the canyon, stopping off at the scenic viewpoints to gaze at the river below. One stop was along the Pont d'Artuby, the highest bridge in Europe. I had no idea France had such wonders as a Grand Canyon and a highest bridge. My mental picture of France is made up of the famous structures in Paris, goat cheese, baguettes and croissants, and stripy shirts and berets. Sadly, I never saw anyone wearing a stripy shirt, but there were quite a few berets.

At the end of the canyon is a most beautiful lake, Lac du Ste Croix, with a glowing, green color. We'd read that there were kayaks and paddle boats to rent here, but had already discussed continuing on to our destination, the village of Moustiers Ste Marie for a wander, then on to Aix-en-Provence. That was until we reached the lake and saw that we could paddle a ways up into the canyon. The colors were too inviting, and we needed to absorb a bit of nature. Our one hour paddle up into the canyon was, for me, a trip highlight. The area is absolutely stunning, and I wished we were able to do a full, canyon rafting trip. Unfortunately, there is whitewater in the canyon, so the rafting trips were out for me right now.

We took another break in the village of Moustiers Ste Marie and found ourselves surprised yet again. The village is set among mountain peaks with waterfalls and a stream running through the middle of town, a chapel set high up into the cliffs (a 30 minute, steep walk uphill that we did not do), and flower covered shops selling the town's claim to fame, faience pottery, a delicate, pretty style. Intending to do just a quick walk thru town (much like our intention to just drive by Lac du Ste Croix), we slowed down and enjoyed the quiet atmosphere...and ate crepes.

And finally, we reached Aix-en-Provence, a bustling, yet charming, town filled with university students. We happened onto a small restaurant with a set menu, Ze Bistro, and this meal is now one of Nathan's all time favorites. With only ten or so tables, we were fortunate that they could fit us in on a Friday evening. If you're in Aix-en-Provence and looking for a great meal, Ze Bistro is our recommendation. By good fortune, Aix-en-Provence's amazing market was the following day, so we had the morning to explore it before checking out of our hotel and continuing on our trip through Provence. This was our first market of the trip and marked the start of seeking out towns having their daily markets. The French markets are so different from our Italian ones, which I do enjoy...but, quite frankly, the French markets are far classier.  With our markets in Italy, generally I wade through and past dozens of tacky stands to find that one gem. In France, it's hard to pass up a single stall. Aix-en-Provence combined a large food market, filled with sausages, cheeses, and spices, with an antique market (oh, how I love vintage, French linens!), and then the ubiquitous stalls selling straw, market bags, beautiful pottery, interesting jewelry, and provencal fabrics. Needless to say, we spent a little more time than planned in the market, and by the time we finished, both of us had feet too tired to do anymore exploring of the town. Time to hit the road again.

Missing Prince Albert While in the Can

We are back home for the next two months...sort of. Weekend car trips will still happen, but long trips via airplane are finished. I have two months to accomplish a LONG list of goals, one of which is to finish posting about our France/Switzerland Grand Adventure. When I left off, we were still in Italy, making our way over to Provence. First stop: the Cote d'Azur. We decided that we'd be getting a lot of beach time in this summer, so the Cote d'Azur was more of a stopping point and checkmark on the bucket list rather than a huge exploration. Our destination was Antibes, which seemed to be a bit of a poor cousin to it's chic neighbors.

But before reaching Antibes, we stopped at the cliff top village of Eze, mainly due to guidebooks hawking it's appeal. We did not take into account that we live in a country which specializes in hill towns and cliff top villages. Eze-le-Village was certainly cute enough, but completely overrun with people. We (quite fortunately) found parking with only a 10 minute wait, and made our way up the steep path. One large appeal to Eze is the Fragonard shop. Since we were not going to Grasse, where the Fragonard Perfumerie is actually located, a chance to visit the shop and stock up on their beautiful scents was quite a treat. In Grasse, the majority of the world's perfumes are created, and Fragonard is one of the old school perfumeries. A highlight to Grasse is the chance to create your own perfume scent, and in hindsight, we probably should have carved out time to do this. Since we didn't, we instead spent a long time in the Fragonard shop smelling their personal scent lines and each picking up a bottle. There, Nathan found out that Prince Albert of Monaco was dining at the fancy hotel in town, meaning the town had lots of extra security around. For those who do not follow Monaco's royal family, the House of Grimaldi, Prince Albert is the country's ruler and is the son of Grace Kelly.

This old outhouse is not the "can" I used.

We headed uphill into the town proper, explored the picturesque, stone streets, ignored the shops filled with overpriced, tourist bait, and headed back downhill to enjoy our first meal in France - yummy salads. This may sound like an odd choice, but Neapolitan restaurants don't really do roughage. Your salad will be either lettuce or rucola, a couple of tomatoes, and a bottle of olive oil set on the table. So our joy at huge, veggie and cheese filled, tasty salads did not dim for our entire French sojourn. Following lunch, I headed off for my bathroom break before getting back on the road to Antibes, and when I met back up with Nathan on the small street heading out of town, he greeted me with this statement, "You missed seeing Prince Albert because you were in the can." [Any youngish readers will just have to google this to find the irony.]. Prince Albert and his entourage/security had driven past, and I missed it! My one chance to see a royal, evaporated. I got over it quickly.

In Antibes, we checked into our hotel, and headed into town for a little walking tour (our own, not guided). The town has a very nice pedestrian area, but really, not a whole lot appealed to us. I think our favorite part of the afternoon was the surprise of finding a beautiful, public beach (meaning no pay entry - most common in these parts) to just sit and enjoy the ancient city walls lining the clean, sandy beach and wading in the clear waters. Antibes does have a highly regarded Picasso Museum, which we skipped. You may remember from my first post about this trip that one of our big pleasures was releasing ourselves from feeling "obligated" to see every museum, church, and tourist site and instead, just enjoying the communities we were joining for such a short time. Antibes, for us, was a nice enough stop, but nothing awe inspiring...which worked out since our vacation ended up getting better and better each day.

Final Air Travel

One last trip has us in Sicily. The water is so clear and refreshing. We are set up in a quiet cove with beach chairs and this view.

Classy Portofino

This vacation was fraught with planning struggles, from what the vacation would actually be to Nathan having work conflicts up until the day before we were due to leave. We actually couldn't book our hotels until two days prior to departure, and even then, it was done with crossed fingers. Having finally figured out that we would be driving our own car to Provence with a stop along the Italian Riviera, we had planned to go to Cinque Terre, a beautiful, region consisting of five (cinque) villages along the coast. However, Cinque Terre experienced devastating landslides last year, and one of the main attractions, a coastal hike that links the five villages, is not yet fully opened.

Portofino Harbor

We decided, for now, to hot-foot it up to Provence with just a quick, easy, one night stop. As you may remember from the photos we uploaded while on vacation, we ended up in beautiful, Santa Margherita Ligure. I'd hoped for Portofino, mainly because it makes all the glossy mags as THE place to be. Leaving Santa Margherita Ligure on our first full day of vacay, we headed north on the two lane, coastal road to at least see Portofino. I cannot even imagine how horrific that road must be in the summer since as it turns out, there is one way in, one way out. But with almost no cars on the road on a beautiful, Thursday morning, we were able to enjoy the bright, green-blue water and colorful buildings along the way. Landing in Portofino and parking in the lone car garage, much to our surprise, we found Portofino to be incredibly SMALL! In fact, there seemed to be more space given over to the parking garage and parking lots (lots for people with mysterious, "I belong here" stickers rather than for people such as us) than for actual shops and restaurants. Now admittedly, the one block pedestrian zone is quite adorable, and the harbor even more so. Adorable and tiny. There is a lovely walk that circles the harbor, and lining that walk, my favorite thing about Portofino:

Never let it be said that Portofino is not a classy town, because if neon pink meerkats topping a columns aren't classy, then I don't know what is.

Travel Pause

As you've gathered, we've spent the last few weeks getting in our travel before the time for car trips only begins (next week!). We have one last (and short) trip up our sleeves, but for all intents and purposes, we'll spend the rest of the summer at home or taking weekend trips to nearby beaches...or the mountains to escape the heat which roared in and has knocked me and Crazy Dog for a loop. No longer is he Crazy Dog, but rather, Lazy Dog. Here in Italy, there is no such thing as central heat and A/C. Most Americans manage to negotiate into their leases some electric, wall units. These are much quieter and more efficient (in cooling, not in money!) than what you may be imagining...those horrid, window units that seem to be so popular in America. The units we have provide both heat and A/C and are mounted up near the ceiling.  A tube goes through the wall to the outside of the house, where it either drips the condensation onto the terrace or is piped into exterior drainage pipes. These work fairly well, so Scully and I spend as much of our day as possible in our living room, where I keep one unit running. Scully has taken to lying directly underneath the air flow for maximum cooling. He gets his summer haircut this week. We'll take pictures because I've never seen a more ridiculous looking dog than a shorn Scully dog.

Now that our travels are over, I'm excited to go through our photos and share some highlights from the recent trips. We spent two weeks driving through Provence and Switzerland, and it was a most relaxing vacation. I'd lobbied hard for either a cruise (turns out cruise lines don't like pregnant women to be aboard) or a "sit on the beach at a resort" vacation. I lost, thankfully, because we ended up with a very relaxing, meandering vacation. As Nathan pointed out to friends recently, living in Naples and having near constant access to Roman ruins, beautiful cathedrals, artwork, and so on, has the result of lessening our desire when traveling to "see the sights." Naturally, Provence is quite proud of their Roman ruins, and these are talked up in the guidebooks as must sees. Since we can stand on our Roof Terrace and see a Roman castle, we have no qualms about skipping the nearest "must see" Roman ruin or "don't miss" cathedral when we travel. Instead, we can focus on the actual towns and villages, the lifestyle, and just enjoying the area through walking and driving and visiting the various, outdoor markets rather than hurrying from one sight to the next.

Very shortly after our return from the big vacation, I headed off to Istanbul with a friend. We had four full days in that beautiful city, so I'll be posting about that trip as well. Today, I begin the organizing, labeling, and editing of the hundreds of photos we've taken over the last month of travels. Eek! And in typing this, I just realized that I still have a few photos from Barcelona to finish up on, as well as share them here. Just to slow the photo process down even more, I'm using new photo editing software. While I have fallen far short of my goal in digital photo organization, I have managed to keep photos well organized on the computer. The real goal, though, is to create photo books for each large vacation, as well as yearly photo books. I love photo albums. I look back through photo albums. I put them on easels for display. Before the advent of digital photography, I was religious about placing all my glossy photos into albums and labeling each photo, with the unhappy result of now having thick, space waster albums that would cover shelves and shelves if I actually ever had the space for them. I am now pretty religious about labeling photos from vacations, mainly due to the fact that we went on a wonderful trip to Germany in 2006, took loads of great photos, loaded them onto the computer, and that was the end. I now look back at the file and have no memory of where a photo was taken. Thus, I'm big on photo organization.

Before we moved to Italy, I was fed up with the overwhelming amount of photos still in boxes, despite my obsession with getting them into albums. I was determined to not move overseas with such a large, looming project on my shoulder, and thankfully, I happened onto GoPhoto, who scanned in hundreds of my photos and put them on DVDs for me. There are several companies who do this type of service, and I know people who purchase high quality scanners and scan their own photos. For me, the time involved in doing it myself was far too significant vs GoPhoto's prices. They gave me personal attention, emailed me throughout the entire process, even called me after shipping the photos and DVDs back to me to make sure I was happy. In under two weeks (I think it was closer to a one week turn around), I had in my hands DVDs of our old wedding photos, bunches of those fabulous black and white, old family photos that seem to fill shoeboxes in most people's homes, and tons of other miscellaneous photos that had piled up. So, so happy! (As an FYI, I am not receiving any benefits for mentioning GoPhoto; in fact, unless they have an awesome PR team who monitors the web for any mention of their name, they won't even know about this plug. I'm just sharing my personal experience.). I have an OCD dream of one long shelf, holding beautiful, thin-spined photo books with all our pictures. And a nightmare of losing all our photos - for me, they are quite literally, the most valuable thing I own...perhaps because my memory is just so darn bad! So, on to reliving vacation through the photo organization and then sharing our trips with you...