Promenading on the Riviera

THE hotel in Nice (l); looking west along the Promenade des Anglais (r)

Nice (week 10)

We decided to spend the weekend in Nice, figuring we should go when it was still warm enough to get the Riviera effect, but past the August tourist rush.  The hotel we stayed in did, in fact, have a sign "complèt" on the door, so the tourists are still around, but it wasn't so busy to be annoying (certainly less crowded than the Lakeshore area of Toronto when the temperature exceeds 25C).  The signs in our hotel (the Locarno) were helpfully posted in French and Russian - apparently the two nationalities that created Nice as a vacation spot were the English and the Russians.  The hotel was a ways west of the the Vieux Ville, but only a block inland from the seafront Promenade des Anglais.

Nice is a strange place.  It has a high level of sophistication (it is the 5th-largest city in France) - art museums abound, and most of them are free entry.  Then there's the beaches - really quite poor for sunbathing (but it doesn't stop the locals) because they are hard-packed dirt or rock, but the swimming is excellent because it gets deep very quickly.  However, trying to find a child-friendly place to eat was very difficult at night: everything along the beach closed by 6pm (the sun is up until 9pm), everything else was closed by 8pm, except the fancier places that had plats starting at €50.  We eventually had to settle for a shawarma place on Friday night!

David in the misting splashpad

We spent Saturday promenading from our hotel to Castle Hill.  There is virtually nothing left of the old Nice castle, but there is a nice park up there, and even an elevator to ride up to the summit.  The distance from our hotel was 2.5 km along the Promenade des Anglais, which the boys had no problem completing.  We ate at one of the hilltop cafés and admired the views.  We then went back along the Cours Saleya (we missed the world-famous flower market, which only runs in the morning), past Matisse's old house, past the former palace of the Dukes of Savoy (now a police station), then along the Promenade du Paillon, the broad park running diagonally through town.  The last was a highlight because part of the way along there are a couple of what we might call splashpads - of course they are sophisticated European splashpads, so everyone was walking through them, from businessmen to skateboarder 20-somethings to kids to bridesmaids (there were wedding parties everywhere on this Saturday afternoon).

With the many stops and snacks and splashing, that walk took pretty much the entire day.  We stayed over and Sunday had a dip and rock-collecting expedition to the beach, then back home.