You can’t go home …

Thursday, September 26
Nice

The morning saw us up, out the door of Eva’s Rooms, and being driven back to the Fiumicino Airport for our first EasyJet flight. When we gathered up luggage in Nice and piled into another van to be driven to our next hotel, I felt a little disoriented by my surroundings. We lived in Nice for several months in 1985, while I was on Sabbatical leave from Birmingham-Southern. But though some things looked familiar — the palm trees, the boulevard, the Negresco hotel — others were new. Not that I didn’t expect change; the passage of time had surely made some memories fade, while others seemed to have been cemented in memory. Some things really were new, to be sure. The airport terminal we went through was quite new, and that was a good thing; but, for example, I missed seeing the place where we watched people playing boules near the boulevard. Never found that spot at all, and I’m afraid that’s where we saw a lot of earth-moving and construction equipment parked. The harbor, the beach, the Old City — those looked just right.

The Hotel Albert 1er was perfectly located for us. We were literally miles away from our old neighborhood, but that seemed less important once we got out and explored a little. We were just a block away from the beach and right on the edge of the old city, next to the long park that was built over a river running through the city. Once again, Jan had arranged hop-on-hop-off tickets for us, so that getting around the city could be a little easier. After just a short time to move into our rooms and get settled, we trooped down to the beach, got on the bus, and this time were the proud recipients of a deeper green shade of ear-buds.

The ride through Nice was fun, and comparing the old familiar sites, like the harbor, with striking new ones, like the library “head,” probably made us sound like the very worst of tourists. Still, it was fun to be reminded of the Chagall Museum, the monastery and its rose gardens, and the Matisse house/museum and garden. Nice: Library HeadAnd we couldn’t just sit there and listen to the recorded commentary. We were too excited just to be there again. Mark probably thought we were nuts, but he has to have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing after being in the family for over a decade.

We shortened the ride a bit, returned to the hotel, and decided that it was time to walk around and check out the Old City. A short time later we were seated outdoors at a café/bar, watching restaurants setting up their dining facilities where the market had been that morning. Here we were with an opportunity to relax and not have a schedule, a great change from the previous three days. We managed to learn a little about Provence Rosé, a really nice dry wine that we had not experienced before. It was good to have a chance to just sit and talk, without worrying about when we had to be where.We passed a smart phone around the table, just to see what we looked like.

Eventually hunger moved us on, and we all enjoyed dinner, again outdoors. At the risk of perpertrating a little food porn, here’s a sample of our dinner dishes, from soup to dessert, (no nuts on the menu).

Credits:

“Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” – Ella Winter to Thomas Wolfe, who subsequently used the phrase as the title of a novel published posthumously in 1940.

Unattributed photographs: Jim
Beach and lighthouse photos at top of page: KC
Food photographs at the bottom of the page: KC