France #1 - Close to Nice
Note! For the visual guide (pictures), please check the gallery.
France comes in two parts. One from close-to-nice and the other one close to, well, nothing but a beach. Let’s come back to the second part a bit later, though, because that’s going to be even worse than this one and I wouldn’t want to bum You out.
This is what I think:
Reet had the highest hopes for the European trip’s success on France and by the end of France, she was thoroughly disappointed.
Road to France
But. Alps again. Instead of driving 4 hours from Alba to our next location, I said that it’s the last time we could see Alps, please, please, let’s drive a bit longer and not pay the extra toll, also, we’d have some views on the way, that I have already found a spot where we can stop and stretch our legs.
And the girls agreed. The new road went over the Alps, instead of the highways near the sea. About an hour in, and there they were. Google maps started showing what we call Puke-Road (as kind of a joke because both Saskia and Reet had puked on similar roads when we last visited Scotland (and did the Golden Circle – that was a nice trip as well)).
And it wasn’t long before the women started complaining that they weren’t feeling good. And not long after that we stopped to clean the car from Saskia’s intestines. She was happy, though, because she got the green light to sit in front next to me.
Isola 2000 was the place we stopped at and had a nice expensive lunch (everything up until Spain (that comes after France) has been expensive and I believe it’ll be the same in Spain, I just don’t know it yet).
Then again, what is expensive. Is Italy expensive for Italians? For Germans? For Swiss? I think the problem with me thinking that everything is expensive is with me or rather, our budget and wish to travel for as long as we possibly could. But when do you stop and think that this is too much saving? Reet is the opposite. She, for example, doesn’t want to hear anything about “daily” or similar budget. The money will last for as long as it lasts, she says. This kind of recklessness will end our journey after 3 months (spoiler: it won’t, maybe after 4, though?), I’m afraid, but to go against Reet, the main sponsor, is not something I dare to do (or rather, she won’t let me limit anything anyway).
But we ate and the food was good and the views were great and there was even a playground for Emmi and Saskia. and after 9 hours of driving and resting and enjoying the views, we finally arrived.
The awesome place in an area called La Gaude
It was about 7 when we arrived. The nice woman showed us the “French” one-side-of-a-house where we’d live and asked for extra money, because for the first time ever, the linen and towels were not included in the price but as an extra (French bring their own linen, because they don’t trust others’ washing machines?). This was the first disappointing experience with AirBnB. There will be more, like:
Cleaning fees not being included either and that’s described under house rules in French somewhere where we didn’t know to look for..
In the next place, there were no linen and towels and we couldn’t even have them as an extra, even though listed under amenities.
Then in Spain, again under amenities it said “free parking on premises”, which meant minimum of 5 minutes’ walk from the car if you’re lucky and can find a spot.
People also say that an apartment is a penthouse even though it’s on 15. Floor of 21 floor building. Or even on a second floor, but because it’s the top floor, it’s a penthouse.
Not to mention… the carelessness of the hosts… but we’ll come back to that in spain.
Point is. In AirBnB, they can write whatever and as an Estonian I just go ahead and suck it all up instead of putting my foot down.
In any case, the woman asked for ~50 euros for the linen and towels and there we were. Close to the Alps, a home with a pool.
What we didn’t have was a separate room for Saskia to get the pool into our budget (well, we’re over our budget with every accommodation, but an extra room And a pool was too much even for Reet). Didn’t think too much of it before, but promised that in the future we would not exchange Saskia’s privacy for a pool (it’s not only Saskia’s privacy, the living room should not be a bedroom, especially if you want the child to go to bed earlier than you’d want to go).
The pool!
The pool was 20 degrees. It even had a jacuzzi (a cold water one). Cool. As it happened, though, we were either not home during the day or were home when it was cloudy, windy, or rainy, so not warm enough for a swim. As a result, the pool was used maybe 4 times for 3h or so in total (maybe more when I as hiking alone, but I’d guess that not by much). Worth the money?
The place itself wasn’t hell.
It was nice and cold, but not too cold.
The pool was nice (for the jacuzzi I never felt it was warm enough – same 20 degree water inside) when there weren’t bugs in it (and there were a lot of them on some days. On the days, we think, the pool wasn’t cleaned).
But…
3 rolls of toilet paper for a week, because otherwise the owner would have gone broke. It was almost enough to last for a week, though… almost! Luckily I had stolen a roll from the previous place earlier.
Not just that. Coffee, salt, pepper, cooking oil… These things should be there, it’s not that F’ng expensive to provide to the guests, is it? Add 10 euros extra as the price or something. Stupid places to cut corners from.
We ran out of gas and the owner wasn’t home, so had to go to McDonalds for one meal instead. The one time I actually Did not Prefer McDonald’s, because it ran out during the cooking of the meal and I was hoping for that already. Who has a gas stove and doesn’t explain and show what to do when we need to switch the gas out? Stupid. At least she had an extra and solved it when she got home. It was not the case in Spain… Oh that one hellhole in Spain.
That one missing room for Saskia.
The beds… and it’s in most places, not just there… 140 cm’s for 2 people. Emmi sleeps with us for some time during every night, unfortunately, still, instead of her baby cot and not all of us fit there and luckily for me, I didn’t fall down. Emmi wasn’t that lucky. I hopefully won’t mention it again later, but… for the rest of the Europe, 140cm was the width of each bed, just sad.
And that awful shower. It had a bath… that leaked water, but could be filled in a few hours, I guess. So, no-one actually uses the bath other than the baby. And the highest you could bring the shower head to, was to the shoulders, the hose just wasn’t long enough.
I think this might be just me, I think I should have sat down in the cold bath and then washed myself sitting down. If that’s how French people wash themselves, then… I wouldn’t want to be French.
But it’s not like we were there for an awful amount of time. We had lots to do:
A hike with Reet, Emmi and me.
A hike with just me.
Visiting Nice, that was 30 minutes away by car.
Visiting Cannes, which was again 30 minutes away by car.
Just shopping in between nice and Cannes and most importantly…
Just getting to the closest store from our location with Saskia and Emmi on foot.
Let’s start with the latter
At one point in time, Dario thought to himself, I need to go and walk Emmi to sleep. I need some steps and Emmi needs her Beauty sleep. And as Saskia hadn’t moved for the whole previous day, she needed to tag along.
Two stores available both ~40 minutes away in opposite directions.
I felt like one was more in the centre of the “village?” our location belonged to, so started going that way until we found out that a walking path that was shown by Maps.me, didn’t actually exist.
So, after 20 wasted minutes, we passed our home again to start the journey to the other store.
And what a journey it was. An uphill battle with Emmi in her stroller and Saskia sometimes running sometimes sitting, mostly asking if we’re up yet. The problem with the uphill battle, though, was the fact that it was a Puke-road - steep corners and room for 1,5 cars. No sidewalk and lots of blind corners.
So I ran when I didn’t hear a car coming, to pass those corners and “screamed” at Saskia when she stayed too far behind me.
And when we were finally up, with 20 minutes to go. A police car which had passed us 2 times while going uphill, stopped us and said that I’m stupid and shouldn’t walk there, that it’s too dangerous.
I kindly said that I know that I’m stupid and that I was hoping that at least now there’s some sidewalk to continue the journey by foot. The policeman responded that I’m stupid for believing that. There are no sidewalks close-by. People either take a bus or a taxi, but never walk there. Had to call Reet to pick us up. And she did and we went reached the goal. ~9700 steps in total. Not even 10 000!
Because Reet came and picked us up in a hurry… when backing up, she ran over Emmi’s scooter. That was a sad event.
Now, why Saskia had to come with to the kamikaze journey with me, was because she didn’t come to the hike with me and Reet on the previous day.
That hike with Reet, Emmi and me
You could find like a million hikes withing a 2-hour drive radius. Most of them rated hard. Some medium difficulty and only a few easy ones. With Emmi we like to drive as little as possible and not take the difficult one, so we found a place only 15 minutes from us and rated as medium with okay distance / time, the Hike to Baou de la Gaude.
Read from one of the reviews in the AllTrails app that inexperienced hikers should do the hike the other way around and we did. We don’t feel that the experience part mattered, but. Had we done the hike the other way around then we would have seen the best part in the first hour and then felt bored for the 3 hours that would have come after. But we slowly ascended and gradually saw better and better views. And then, at the top after climbing 400 meters I think we were presented with the view to the… well… nothing… It was just a cliff where you could look down from the top to see extra small houses and water at the farther end. Other than it being scary, it didn’t provide too much more. Did we need more? Oh no, as we’re scared of heights, the nothing did it for us. Was quite fun and definitely worth the visit. But just note that the views are always better if you have other mountain peaks to look down upon.
There was a problem, though. While hiking, Emmi fell asleep. And when Emmi sleeps, we can’t walk with our backpack, or at least that’s what we think (because of no neck support). Now to mitigate this problem, Reet switched Emmi from back to front thus making it much more difficult of a hike than what it would have been. So, either she had exhaustion, or she ate something bad, Reet was out of it for the next couple of days. Not before spending a few hours at a mall, of course on the next day, but after that… she was totally out of it.
How to deal with this situation? Well, on the first day, tried to get as much off of Reet’s shoulders as possible, on the next, I got a green light on an alone hike.
The hike of the five lakes.
Note! For the visual guide for this hike (pictures), please check the gallery.
What a thrill, where to go, what to do, no limitations for distance or drive other than the availability of sunlight (and a tiny bit of regret that I left Reet alone when she was ill, but… she gave me the green light, she gave it to me).
And there really were a lot of choices – 3 of which caught my skilled eye.
One would have been in a Gorge with red rocks. ~1,5h drive.
But it was rated difficult… also, a gorge… feels like something that would get too steep at times for me, who’s afrait of heights.
One would have been to the largest Alpine Lake in the alps, 1,5 h drive.
That was rated difficult as well… but I so so wanted it. The problem: the landlord had said that there was a storm a while back and that the road was not the best to Saint Jeanette and the last images in google or Alltrails were a month ago for that hike. So just to be safe and not drive 1,5 hours and then figure out that I can’t reach the starting point of that hike, I put this hike to the “bucket list of hikes” list.
And one with 5 lakes and something in French.
Rated as medium difficulty and 4 hours. Drive’s a bit longer, though, about 2 hours. Why not. Why not drive a bit more on a scenic PukeRoad and then do an easy hike with some alpine lakes as the views.
And that I did. I drove on the puke-road with my mouth open, it was just so cool (no pics from that, because… where would you even stop there, but… soo woth it). And then the hike.
The hike was a constant ascent. Not too steep to be scary, but always going up. For some reason, I felt like my heart was about to give up on me already while driving there, so that made me worry a bit and also made me slow down, but… didn’t give up, so here I am. Shouldn’t have done the hike though (but I was already there or something). Anyway, took it easy and slow, stopped more often than I probably should have, but I had an excuse, I had to take pics (no I didn’t, most of them were just garbage). In any case, there were 5 lakes, some of which had almost no water (end of summer), but that didn’t make them less awesome. It was fun, after each lake I had a new goal, a new lake.
And then a man passed me. Probably in his 50s. A long beard… Oh he was a perfect model for my pictures. So I followed him and tried to get an image or two with him as a small dot somewhere. But later, when editing the pics, didn’t see him in any of them :D I guess a dot is not enough. In any case, that man was not doing the loop trail I was doing, but going somewhere else. I noticed his incorrect movement when I had descended for 15 minutes of steep descent and thought: why is he going left if we should be going right?. Opened the Alltrails app and understood why. He was probably moving from huts to huts, taking longer journeys than my 5hour ones. So I needed to suck it up, and go back to the top where I did the incorrect turn.
And when I reached up, and looked up. It hit me, not sh*t is getting real. I have seen all 5 lakes. I now either go back the same route, or take the Something part of the “Five lakes and Something in French”, meaning a mountain peak. Last time in Italy I dared not to take a peak. Still, taking the same route back, here, felt too disappointing. So I tried and I wasn’t happy about my 30-minute-distraction beforehand because the ascent was even steeper than before and I needed my energy. Nothing scary, though, turned out. Reached the top without falling or being too afraid. Looking back, the images from the top were nothing special. The lakes were better, but that’s just me not being able to capture proper images. The visit to the top was totally worth it and by far better than the views of the lakes.
After the peak, it was 1,5 hours downhill. About 1h too much for me. I was glad when I finally reached the end without breaking an ankle or something, because the feet just couldn’t carry me any more. Going downhill is worse than going up if you don’t have the walking sticks I think. Still, haven’t bought the sticks yet (I feel that they’re either too expensive or too heavy).
As a bonus to all of that. When I reached the end/starting point. There were white dots everywhere on the mountain next to the parking lot. Sheep. Sheep were going home and I was able to drive with them on the road for the first 15 minutes. Again, a fun experience.
And then we visited Nice.
And then we visited Cannes.
Cannes and Nice summed up
Cannes was smaller than Nice. Both had a beach where we would swim, they were city beaches, meaning that it included a car road > walking/cycling promenade > sand > water, wow. Both had a street where our girls could shop a little. Both were 30 minutes away by car from us. Probably they both offer fine restaurants and awesome museums as well. Not into that. Sorry, didn’t visit.
On the way to either Nice or Cannes, there was a shopping mall next to Nice Airport. I think that was the highlight for the women of our family, says a lot about the places.
Would I have wanted to be closer to Nice? Well, yes and no.
No, because Nice is too large for me, I’d take a small village over a large city anytime (not that we’d even have a choice, staying inside Nice would have been too expensive).
Yes, because we couldn’t move anywhere from our house by foot and after a week of feeling that I can’t even go for a walk without driving a car first, that… that’s just awful. Well, wouldn’t have wanted to be in nice, but somewhere closer to a village, we were in the middle of nowhere, which would probably have been fine, if not for the limited walking options.
Was I happy that we stayed at the area? Yes, oh yes, but just because of that one drive to the hike and that hike itself.
And then we left the place. And then we got a message from the host that said something like: “I was surprised to see cleaning not being done at all”. To which we responded: “awkward, we never planned on cleaning and didn’t know” and thought to ourselves that “during corona time how could we were even be the ones who should clean it” and thus had to send via post 40 extra euros to her in the next place.
Oh. The host was great, though. Brought us some local snacks that Reet even tried and other than walking by from time to time, because we were on her way to her parking spot, we didn’t really see her, we like people who are like that.
