Grand Tour (part 1)

It was a few Sundays ago. I went to a shopping centre that smelled of cheap perfume and then sat in a big tube for a couple of hours with lots of people. I emerged from that pipe and the shopping centre now smelt like more expensive perfume and coffee; it had also moved to the Cote D'Azur.

In this limited life of mine, a recurring pleasure is traveling along the Promenade Des Anglais from the airport into Nice. Few journeys deliver me such optimism, even on a bus. Turquoise sea and palm trees in a sunny city at the foot of the mountains. The hotel was about 2 or 3 hundred yards from the bus stop. Our case has two wheels (it hasn't lost any) at one corner and a handle at the opposite apex; this is problematic because one still has to carry a fair proportion of the baggage's weight and if your hand doesn't rest at the height of the handle, it is becomes an extremely inefficient system. We keep saying we will get new luggage.....next holiday; there are some nice bags about these days. I think there should be one with a fold down skateboard/scooter arrangement.

First stop (after the hotel) is the cleverly named La Pizza restaurant, first visited by me about thirty years ago as the guest of one Jose (father of Julian) Vilarrubi. They are good their pizzas.

We gadded about between shops, restaurants, beaches and cafes till Wednesday morning when I collected our hire car, I hope Postman Pat managed without it for a few days. It had had an appropriate azur re-spray and I laughed when it appeared on the forecourt. I lowered the driver seat to it's bottom setting which meant that there was about a foot and a half of headroom above me but the lowest possible centre of gravity. We inched out of that congested town and on to the Grand Corniche where we opened her up and blasted majestically into nearby Italy. More bright blue optimism, this time with added vertiginous drops. About 700km later we found ourselves wending our way up an unmade road to a village called Macerino in Umbria.