Alassio to Nice - Day 97

Date: November 23rd, 2009
Distance: 128km
Country: France
Song of the Day: Private Helicopter - Harvey Danger

Today was kind of exciting. I was finally leaving Italy. Not that my time there has been bad, but I was ready for a change. Of course I did still have about 60km of Italy to go through. Still, I was feeling good, rolling right along. I was so happy to see that sign upon entering France. I started listening to an audio tutorial for the French language. So hopefully I can pick something up. I think it will be important for West Africa.

Anyway, getting to France wasn't really the end of my problems though. I had a climb ahead of me to get to Monaco. Yep, that will make country ten if you are counting. (I am counting the Vatican as one. My blog, my rules.) Anyway, I wonder how many people reading this have ever been there? For me, I wasn't all that impressed. It just looked like another city crammed into a steep valley. I couldn't stay for long anyway. It was getting dark and I need to get a place to stay. I just took a couple pictures and rolled on.

Then there was a second climb out of Monaco that was worse than the way in. On the other hand, I did get to enter France twice in one day. I can't imagine many people reading this have done that. Still it was quite a climb. The little town of Eze lies in its very name. It is perched at the top of that pass. Argh. At least that meant the last couple of miles down to Nice were amazingly fast.

When I got into Nice it took me about an hour to actually find the hostel I was supposed to stay at. When I got there it was closed. Lame. So I went to the next one on my list. I was getting better as that one only took me half an hour to find. It wasn't really a hostel so much as a hotel. But it was cheap, I was tired and needed to sleep somewhere. In the room with me was a Czech guy. We got to talking for a while and tried to scrape up some internet connection together. The connection there was terrible, I got mine to work once. Oh well, at least that meant I couldn't waste time and just went to bed.

-Dravis