Day 9 - Cote D'azur "The topless beach!"

We made it to Nice (pretty close anyway), we can see it down the beach from where we're staying. We had a great time this morning at the weekend market that took up much of the promenade. The fresh fruit, vegetables, meat, fish etc.. were amazing. We bought a shopping bag (finally) to put our loot in, and proceeded to shop with the locals with our best high school French combined with pointing.

There was a home baking vendor that had some awesome cookies and some huge macaroons that Joanna loves. There was TWO vendors that had HUGE selections of olives and tapenade and such. I grabbed a bag of terrific olives, I had no idea what they were, but they turned out to be stuffed with pimento and seasoned with something a little spicy! Awesome. They had some primo cured ham that is 30 Euro a kilo, which is aout $4.50 cad per 100 grams, so I got some of that and some German style Speck. The jovial butcher, threw in half a round loaf of bread for us as well!

After sipping my 2 cups of café au lait we finished up in the market amking sure we had enough for lunch later, then hit the road. We stopped at a beach god knows where and had some lunch. The Mediterranean beaches are topless, so I was enjoying myself of course. I had a great lunch made from fresh favourites from the market, and the view of the Med was just as nice… It was hot hot hot though, and in the hour we were there, we both got a teensy bit red.

After lunch we continued on to St Tropez and were honestly a bit underwhelmed with the place. It's very Napa de la Med, an there was priceless yachts off the beach, and the beautiful people on the beach. The most cosmetically enhanced topless beaches in Europe I'm sure. We didn't bother, we just drove out there to see what the fuss was about then got the hell out of crazy town.

Headed for Nice, we kept to the coast a certain amount after the freeway hoping we would find a nice place before Nice (proounced Neese in case you didn't know). We found a great spot just before Nice called Villeneuve le Something between Antibe and Nice. We got a great bungalow on the beach, and of course had great views… ;)

We got our beach stuff and headed out onto the beach where I proceded to jump right in. We stayed at the beach for awhile then went for a walk around before dinner. We went to a place that was all about mussels and each had a big bucket with fries.

I had to wash a shirt out in the tub because the laundromat was closed, and like a dummy I had left 3 shirts hanging in the closet of our hotel in Paris. They will be forwarding them to the Hilton at the airport where we'll be for our last night in France.