8 February ’05, Tuesday. Yesterday we kind of stuck around the van. Most of the time we spent with a good book, and then we both felt we needed to get out for awhile. We decided to walk down to the corner and walk through the park and then up the road a little farther to the grocery store, I was looking for some peanut butter. Louise wanted to feed the ducks at the pond, but when we got there, they had a sign that said “Do Not Feed The Ducks”, so we just watched them beg…what a sorrowful sight, even if these were the fattest ducks you have ever seen…hell, someone was feeding them… Our walk to the store for my peanut butter proved to be fruitless. We’ve searched quite a number of stores without results. Getting back to things “of interest” here and there: Sidewalks…they are often non-existent, or when we do have them, they are very narrow with broken concrete, trees growing right out of the middle and haven’t been trimmed to keep the branches above waist height, cars parked on or across them, bicycle lanes take up 90%, and they come to an end right in the middle of the block….crosswalks…France is the first country since Germany, that traffic will stop if you make a motion to cross at a crosswalk, but in the other countries such as Turkey and Greece, you have no rights as a pedestrian, except if you get in the way of a car, you get hit…
Well anyway, today we unhitched Bumble Bee from the tent again and headed off for Grasse. It was about a 40 minute ride out into the hills overlooking the Mediterranean. Grasse is one of the many hilltop towns that are so plentiful in this part of France. Not only does it have a medieval history behind it, it is famous world wide as the city of perfume. Some of the hilltop towns / villages are just “charmingly” small, but Grasse was a town of good size. Fact is, we got turned around by road construction a number of times, and had the distinct “pleasure”??? of going up and down it’s hills many more times than I would want again… Yes, it is a picturesque town, charming in many ways I’m sure, but…
We opted not to stop by one of the many perfume companies, as we had already been introduced to the manufacture of perfume in Egypt, and we still smell like it. We were also looking for The Route de Napolêon, that retraces history, and as they put it; “They did it on foot, so, do it by car”…we took the challenge and did it…by car. It was a very pretty drive into the mountains high above the villages, cities, and the Med far below. Fact is, we even got into the snow again. But the view, beautiful. The unfortunate part of the trip was the weather was heavy overcast and the haze over the valleys just didn’t give us a good photo opportunity.
Well anyway, today we unhitched Bumble Bee from the tent again and headed off for Grasse. It was about a 40 minute ride out into the hills overlooking the Mediterranean. Grasse is one of the many hilltop towns that are so plentiful in this part of France. Not only does it have a medieval history behind it, it is famous world wide as the city of perfume. Some of the hilltop towns / villages are just “charmingly” small, but Grasse was a town of good size. Fact is, we got turned around by road construction a number of times, and had the distinct “pleasure”??? of going up and down it’s hills many more times than I would want again… Yes, it is a picturesque town, charming in many ways I’m sure, but…
We opted not to stop by one of the many perfume companies, as we had already been introduced to the manufacture of perfume in Egypt, and we still smell like it. We were also looking for The Route de Napolêon, that retraces history, and as they put it; “They did it on foot, so, do it by car”…we took the challenge and did it…by car. It was a very pretty drive into the mountains high above the villages, cities, and the Med far below. Fact is, we even got into the snow again. But the view, beautiful. The unfortunate part of the trip was the weather was heavy overcast and the haze over the valleys just didn’t give us a good photo opportunity.