21 May

We left Nice, and stopped in Monaco for about 5 hrs. The lady at the train station tourism booth told us there was no place anywhere to leave our packs while we looked around, so we got directions to the nearest fire station and left our stuff there. We took a tour of the royal palace. They gave us an audio guide player, and the tour had a lot of interesting history, but it's probably not on our list of "don't miss" attractions. We were surprised at how small the rooms are. Of course, we only got to tour about 10% of the place, since the Prince and his family live there.

Monaco/Monte Carlo is really pretty, and the harbor full of yachts was incredible. The gardens were very nice to stroll through. The Grand Prix race was last weekend, and they were still in the process of taking down grandstands and guardrails along a lot of the streets. That would have been cool to go to, but it's probably best that we missed it, crowd-wise.

We thought we'd drop a few Euros in the slots at the casino. They charge 10 Euros just to get in, I guess to keep the riff-raff out. It worked, as we declined the offer, returned to the trains, and traveled to Ventimiglia, Italy, where we spent the night. We met a woman from N.J. at the station and she told us she was staying in a B&B "up the hill." After walking about one mile and climbing what is possibly about the third highest hill in Italy without finding the place, we gave up and returned to downtown, where we only had to climb three long flights of stairs. We thought Spain had lots of narrow winding alleys, but so far, Italy has them beat by a mile.

Nice train station

Monte Carlo / Monaco

Port Hercule	François Grimaldi statue	royal palace
Saint Nicholas Cathedral	Port De Fontvielle	Port De Fontvielle

Damien Hirst sculptures

Pregnant Woman

Unicorn

Unicorn

Man

Monte Carlo / Monaco

Solarium Beach	Joe above beach	boats in Port Hercule	underground parking north of beach
Joe on Bateau Bus	Port Hercule mega yachts	Monte Carlo Casino	Place du Casino fountain
S on Av. d'Ostende	Grand Prix race stuff	Monaco Movers

Ventimiglia, Italy

Ventimiglia Viewpoint