The roads were crap, spiralling down to city level and the harbour basin, broken up, crossbanded, dusty, gravelly and bumpy (must have played havoc with the herds of supercars garaged in the city). There is a lot of money floating about in this tax haven, you'd think they'd spend some on the roads. perhaps they just wanted to put off auslanders entering their sheltered kingdom, (or they all travelled by helicopter)!
We parked up on the sea front/harbour section, stretched our limbs and grinned at each other. What the fuck were we going to do now that we were here? Late afternoon was starting to diffuse into early evening. We grabbed a beer to wash the dust from our parched throats, had a quick mooch and then decided to split and find a bed for net.
The city-state/province/taxhaven, whatever its official title was as big as the eye could see looking up from sea level, but that was it , no bigger, most of it piled higgledy piggledy strewn across the hillside.We had arrived just 10 days or so after the F1 Grand prix. The superstructure of the stands were still in the process of being dismantled and the road itself had a skirt of fine rubber beads on it's perimeter, scrubbed off the tyres of the F1 guys cars. Those F1 guys know how to lay a bit of rubber alright, though usually at Monace they play follow the leader all race.
We checked the boats out in the harbour, all posh stuff with posh people on board wearing posh jumpers draped over their posh shoulders wearing posh looking shoes. I felt like a hobo.It didn't really exude a 'kicking' atmos, we smoked and then we left, proceeding out of the city via a massive underpass, heading for Nice, the nearest place likely to have a cheap hotel to crash at. We would hole up before heading for Barcelona in the morning.
It gradually got darker until full night was upon us, brightened by Nice's urban lampware. We hit the city and drove around aimlessly trying to find an elusive Novotel or similar.In the end we waylaid a moped wielding pizza delivery boy and asked for directions, he promptly said follow him and away he buzzed up the street with us in hot pursuit, he knew where he was going, we didn't, he didn't stop, drove flat out and had no indicators, naturally at 15 or so he was invincible, paying little or no heed, impervious to the urban traffic, we were hard pressed to keep with him. Suddenly he stopped (no brakelights either), gestured and Lo before us a suitable hotel. Thank fuck for that it was getting late, we were tired and hungry and had ridden from Mugello to Florence to Pisa up the bay of Genoa to here in about 8 hours.
We thanked moped street urchin and went for it. It was a fully automated rest site, even the girl behind the counter did a good impression of an automaton, taking our credit card details with robotic indifference, dishing out the relevant keys and info with none of the Gallic charm expected. Still Bollox! We were in and had a bed for the night, just the food scenario to sort. This was France, part of Europe there must be millions of restaurants open 24/7
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