Monaco, San Remo, Florence, Pisa

The sun has been beating down on us for our first few days of Italian vacation.  We are now on our second day in Rome, and had a full day of sights yesterday.  But today all public transport is on strike, and we don’t want to drive from our campsite into town, so but are taking it easy today hanging out by the campsite pool, planning to explore a few things around Rome by car, and have some time to update the blog!

Our journey began on Sunday after saying goodbye to our house in Marseillan.  First stop was Monaco, just for a quick look around.  It was quite a sight!  Money dripping everywhere, huge yachts in the harbour, everything sparkling, and extremely beautiful scenery.  We enjoyed the lifts down to the beach, and making fun of all the rich people on their boats.

We hadn’t planned where to sleep, but we were all getting tired around San Remo area so stopped.  San Remo was an interesting place, clearly seen better days, but with a huge old casino and a lot of big hotels.  The campsite, Villagio dei Fiori, there was the only one so far that hasn’t been really good.  We were camped on concrete next to a tennis court, but it did have a lovely swimming pool, which more than made up for it.

The road down the coast from San Remo was beautiful.  Andy counted more than 100 tunnels, and there were an equivalent number of bridges too. 

We got to the Cinque Terra around lunchtime, and spent the next few hours surrounded by beauty but a huge number of tourists too.  I expect it is really nice if you can get off the beaten track, but for us we were quite glad to just be passing through. On leaving Cinque Terra we drove on to Florence, and stumbled across a campsite just off the ring road.  It was only a quarter full and lovely, grassy terraced site overlooking the Certosa monastery, with a lovely swimming pool and bar, and just a city bus ride into the centre.

We spent one very full day in Florence, hitting all the sites: the Duomo, the Uffuzi gallery, Santa Maria Novella, Ponte Vecchio, and (the copy of ) the David, and some exploring of the streets.  It was a very very hot day, so our sightseeing was punctuated by lots of sitting in shade drinking water, and we were all quite exhausted by the end of the day.

Wednesday we went to Pisa and enjoyed the leaning tower and the Basilica.  There weren’t as many tourists there as I had expected, and even though the tower leaning isn’t a surprise, it is still impressive to see how far it leans – pretty amazing.

After Pisa we drove down to Rome and found a lovely campsite here in Rome, but I'll leave Rome for another post another day....

Adieu Marseillan (I love you!!!)

We leave Marseillan tomorrow. I am so so sad.  After spending the day cleaning the house, going to the park, beach, sitting watching the boats, and moving the contents of our fridge into our stomachs, it is suddenly our final evening in the house.  I don't want to leave.  We've had such a fabulous time here.  The town has been fantastic, but it is mainly the people and their attitude that has made it lovely to be here for the last five months. We were talking this evening abut how none of the four of us can think of anyone who hasn't been nice to us, and there are so many people here who have been amazing, I could easily stay here forever.  I'm too sad now to write anything coherent, so here is a photo of the sunset from our terrace instead.

It's not all sad though, because we are off on an exciting adventure tomorrow - four weeks of camping!  We haven't really planned anything except that in early July we're meeting up with some friends back in the South of France and other friends in Paris.  Before that we're hoping to see a fair bit of Italy, and depending on how things go maybe take a couple of days somewhere else as well.  I'm planning to try to keep this blog going while we travel, but it'll depend on internet availability (and time).

Last day at school

Friday was the boys' last day at school in Marseillan.  They were both really happy to be done and going on holiday (of course!) but I think all-in-all it has been great having them in school here.  They coped with the academic part of school brilliantly - both of them got their report cards on their last day and they both passed the year with an "A" grade, pretty amazing!  And after 5 months, they'd both made a few friends.
Friday was also the day of the school fete, so we spent the evening watching shows put on by each class, eating dinner, and other fete-like things.  The boys spent the entire evening (apart from when they were on stage) playing with their friends and barely stayed with us at all, it was so nice to see.  Also great to spend some time in the lovely schoolyard.

Andy waiting for his turn on stage

Andy's class singing (Andy's right in the middle at the back)

Joe gelled his hair for the occasion.  Several other boys had the same hairstyle.

Joe's class singing

  I love this little video clip where I caught Joe laughing with his classmates.

Joe's class did a few songs and dances, and they were all great, but the final one was funny because the girls and boys were split up.  First the girls did the dance, all synchronised and wonderful, and then the boys did the exact same dance - have a look at the result below....

Finally, a couple of photos of the school.  It is great, all open plan and mostly open air (except the classrooms) and really attractive and well designed.


 

Noilly Prat

The thing that Marseillan is probably most famous for is Noilly Prat (creating that link is the first time I have been to their website. It is hilarious, you have to put in a date of birth older than 18 in order to access it, but no idea why - perhaps because it gives you a martini recipe, very strange anyway).  Noilly Prat is a vermouth that is made in Marseillan and comes in "classic original dry", "rouge" and "ambré".  We like the rouge best.
A tour of the cellars is good fun, we have done both the regular tour (4 euros), and the special tour conducted by the cellarmaster that includes lots of tastings of the different components of the wine (they draw some out of the barrels as you are going round) and the secret room (20 euros).  The special tour might be worth it if you know a lot about wine or vermouth, but we don't so it definitely wasn't worth the extra cost.  Both tours come with a tasting at the end.
There is a really interesting history to the Noilly Prat (that is on the website), but the main thing that stuck in my mind is that they were bought by Barcadi-Martini several years ago (and when you look at the list of what Bacardi-Martini own - Jack Daniels, Grey Goose, Finlandia, Bombay Sapphire, and on and on - it is quite amazing, and easy to see that a relatively small family firm like Noilly Prat could be swallowed up by them as well).
 Anyway, a really interesting place to visit, and rightly a "must see" in Marseillan.

Big barrels!

Stirring the spices in in the "room of secrets"

The wine is left in barrels outside, supposedly to mimic the improvements in taste experienced on long ocean voyages

The cellarmaster pouring for tastings

Le Marché

Tuesday is market day in Marseillan.  The market takes over the whole town centre, closes several roads, and seems to attract a lot of people into town.  I'm not quite sure why though - apart from a couple of nice food stalls, the market is basically sells tat and several stalls of brightly coloured baskets.  I often look at the baskets and think they're nice, but I have no idea what I would ever do with one if I had one, so resist the temptation.  Everything else is quite easy to resist (or perhaps I'm just obsessed with not picking up any unwanted stuff!!).

Baskets

More baskets

Union Jack bikini anyone?

Dried fruit here is fabulous.  Fresh - if "fresh" and "dried fruit" can go together

Marseillan

I'm getting a bit sad now that we only have one more week left in our house in Marseillan, before we head off on a seven week camping adventure! I thought I'd post some random photos of the town and environs.

First off, Marseillan Plage.  I've written a couple of times (here and here) about going to and fro from Marseillan Plage.  We go to the beach pretty much every week, it is about a 5km bike ride and the beach is long and sandy.  The two parts of town - Marseillan Ville and Marseillan Plage - are like night and day though.  Marseillan Plage being full-out trashy tourist place.  It is kind of fun, but Marseillan Ville is way way nicer, and a real town.

The main strip to the beach, Marseillan Plage

Marseillan Plage

Marseillan Plage

The rest of the photos are of Marseillan Ville (where we live), just a few I found that I haven't already put in other posts.

Le Chateau du Port, a hotel and restaurant

View across the Port

In the main square

Part of the main town square

The Tabac where they sell an excellent selection of 5c gummi candies (and Le Monde if you're not in the mood for gummis)

The Hotel de Ville, a very important place for us for the first few days in town, and full of really nice people

View from outside the Hotel de Ville

Our fruit and veg shop

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The Mediatheque (on the left), basically a library, and the church (right).  Our house is close to the church and we hear the bells ring every hour.  The boys aren't supposed to get up until the bells ring 7am

Mopeds parked round the back of the church

The theatre

Where we pick up fresh mussels for supper

Doesn't take more than 5 minutes walk from the centre to get right out of town

Réserve Africaine de Sigean

A few weeks ago we went to the Réserve Africaine de Sigean, a Safari Park / Zoo just off the road to Spain. In some ways our going there was a demonstration of the power of advertising - there are billboards everywhere from Marseillan Plage to Barcelona advertising this place, and eventually we could resist it no longer!

It was pretty fun, about an hours drive through the lions, rhinos, ostriches, zebras, bears and wildebeest, and then several hours on foot through a zoo bit.  The boys enjoyed it, but there was a bit of an air of it having seen better days, especially the reptile house which was all concrete and dirty water and a bit sad. We did see all the animals we were expecting though, and the lions were really impressive.

The boys loved seeing the baby in the pouch

 The best thing about the day was all the beautiful peacocks wandering around.  They were all over the place, and we thought the albino ones looked like angels.

Ceinture jaune

A while ago I wrote that Andy's aim for Judo was to get his yellow and white striped belt before we left France.  Well, guess who was awarded a full yellow belt yesterday?!  (That's better than yellow and white striped).  Andy is very proud of himself, and the little ceremony was very cute too.  They had to kneel in front of the instructor and take off the old belt and then they received the new one and had to bow.
We were proud parents too!

Tous à vélo

Today Andy and I participated in the much advertised Tous à vélo to inaugurate the new bike path from Marseillan Ville to Marseillan Plage - a 5ish km bike.  It was way better attended than I had expected it to be - there were hundreds and hundreds of people there, mainly adults.  We all got a white T-shirt with Marseillan on it (nice souvenir!), and it was a lot of fun biking with so many people, if a little dangerous - we saw at two minor accidents ourselves, plus we drove past a really nice bike that had literally snapped in two (looked like he had ridden straight into a wall), with an ambulance nearby tending to the rider, hope he was OK.  The bike path itself is great, but we have already ridden it several times, so we knew what to expect.  The town are on their toes and already have a nice little video up of the event here, (I could not see either Andy or me in it).  I imagine the town must be really happy with the turnout, it was incredibly impressive, I had expected about 50 people, not the hundreds that turned up.

A couple of photos of us (the second taken by Andy) in our smart new T-shirts headed for the start line.