Some Parting Images of Nice

The remarkable and improbable view out of our window.Hanging out in the courtyard in front of the flat.

Walking home...

The best swimming beach (VilleFranche) was a 15 minute bus ride away....

From Castle hill looking over the Old Town "Vieux Nice".

The day we forgot her swimsuit.

Eilidh gets engrossed in Harry Potter.

Just a couple more days until we pick up our car (which we'll have for 4 weeks) and jump on the ferry out to Corsica for the week. After that, our 'social season' starts.... We come back through Nice, pick up my mom, and drive to Provence for a week (where my mom's former foreign exchange student, Fabienne, from Germany might join us). After that we drive to the Dordogne region for a week (where many of the cave paintings are!), drop off my mom for her flight home, and then on to Collioure (on the border of France and Spain) to meet up with our friends Bobby and Vicky and their two little girls. After that it is the canal cruise with the Saltonstalls! We're looking forward to changing it up a bit, but also dreading having to be organized and all the packing. It's been lovely to spread out, get comfortable, and have a little home for a month.

Its been interesting watching Nice change. When we arrived in late August it was a tourist mad-house. There were fiestas every weekend, weddings on the beach, drag queen balls (how I wish I could have gone!), packed squares, street performers, Russian, English and German accents everywhere. Starting on Sunday, about 1/4 of the shops were closed, the volleyball court on the beach and lifeguard towers have been taken down, and the streets are squares are peaceful. Yesterday when we went swimming in VilleFranche there were five people swimming and about 50 on the beach, whereas last week there were over 20 swimming and a couple hundred sunbathing. Its definitely given a taste for a our next couple months. Time to bring the pace down a notch...

The girls are flourishing with all of the free time. They've become even more close and play (usually) so well together... They are doing a lot of art projects (coloring beach rocks to surprise future bathers, learning how to draw animals and sketching art we find at the art museum), doing a lot of make-believe with their ponies and their pets, and Eilidh is doing a lot of reading. A day without a visit to a park or a beach is in general a bad day, we've learned, so we do that most days. And a visit to the park means that we have to stop at the boulangerie and pick up croissants. Which is what we are doing momentarily...