Plucky Survivors See Europe Day 43: Lake Como to Nice

Before we get to Day 43, there are a few things left over from Day 42, my evening in Lake Como.

I know that Bellagio and the surrounding villages are very scenic, but I saw none of them.  I went to the bar and got drinks, then sat on the lounge chair and enjoyed the view. 

Eventually I got up and ordered room service – an insane focaccia bruschetta with tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, basil, garlic, and oregano and a delicious despite its appearance lasagna.

As I sat there with my cocktail watching the sun go down, I had a random thought: “Wouldn’t it be cool if there were fireworks over the lake?”  A few hours later, there were fireworks over the lake. 

I’m currently trying to manifest wealth to pay for this trip.

This morning, I got up and sat on the patio some more and worked on a Christmas movie script, which amused me, then someone from the very nice staff came and said, “No, sir, you can’t live here, you need to leave.”

I had done some research over the evening and finally found a solution for Plucky Mobile 2’s intransigence over hooking up to Apple Car Play.  Turns out a simple cable swap took care of it and now I’m much more comfortable with the car.

Good thing because the road out of Lake Como is a terrifying, barely big enough for one car let alone two challenge.  I stopped to take one last picture, with a cloud over one of the mountains.  Gorgeous.

Traffic to Nice was fine everywhere except around Milan.  There was no good way to avoid it so the journey took longer than I had hoped it would.

The good news is that once I got past Mian it’s yet another gorgeous drive through the mountains and then suddenly you come out of a tunnel and there’s the Mediterranean.  I was unable to take any road pictures because the highway requires full concentration from there all the way into Nice.  It’s a series of tunnels and bridges that skirt above the Italian and French Riviera towns with breathtaking vistas and lots of twists and turns and traffic that don’t seem very forgiving to tourists trying to gawk.

As I reached the border of France, I got flagged by the guards and sent for a secondary inspection.  I knew I had done nothing wrong and yet I still found myself nervous for some reason.  They were very kind and impressed by the road trip I’m on.  I think the thing that helped is that one of them asked me, “What’s the best country you’ve been to?” and I replied “France, of course.”  My momma didn’t raise no fools.  Except for my brother, but that’s an entirely different story.

I got into Nice around 4pm, making it too late to do a few things I wanted to do, so I got back into the car and headed to Monaco.  It’s always been a bucket list thing of mine to say I gambled in Monaco – seems glamourous and James Bondian.

It’s not.  It’s a casino.  I mean, don’t get my wrong, it’s a nice casino and Monte Carlo is a completely different planet, a playground for the insanely wealth mixed with tourists who want to gawk at them.  There are signs actively discouraging photographs of people and vehicles, but believe me when I say that I felt like an Appalachian hillbilly living in a tar-paper shack next to a lot of these people. 

The main area around the casino is lined with the highest of high-end stores and a line of valet parked cars with names like Bently, Rolls, Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Maserati.  You drive a Mercedes?  Scoff… self park in the garage.

There are many casinos in Monte Carlo but the main and most famous one is the Casino de Monte Carlo.  It’s a gorgeous building that dates back to the 1850s, but in the end it’s slot machines, blackjack tables, and roulette wheels.  I won money here then lost money in the sister casino across the way, Café de Paris, which is much more pedestrian in presentation.

I got some dinner at the Café de Paris, a fantastic French onion soup, loaded with cheese and soft bread; a filet that was good but not good enough to justify its eye-popping price; and some mashed potatoes that had so much butter and cream in them I could hear my arteries snapping shut with every bite.  In other words, delicious.

Tomorrow’s plan is very up in the air.  My intention was to drive along the French Riviera and visit a lot of little towns and offbeat museums, but I wasn’t aware that the 14^th is Bastille Day, France’s version of Independence Day, so every place I was going to go is closed.  We’ll see what the day brings.