Italy and self-revelations

Wednesday, 9/10

Before leaving for our trip, I had asked AAA about traveling to Italy – specifically, getting a Eurail pass to do that, as well as maybe travel around France – this was during the “we know better” time and thought we could do most of the trip without a car. When AAA told us the Eurail pass, for 4 days (any 4 days, didn’t have to be consecutive) would be almost $1000, we decided we weren’t that anxious to see Italy. But I had done some looking into the town of San Remo earlier on, and once we got the car, our horizons were limitless, so we decided to venture into Italy. Besides, San Remo looked on the map to be about 10 minutes past the France border.

Jim asked at the front desk of the resort how to get to the A8 going east. They told him we could certainly get to San Remo that way, but they recommended the scenic drive along the coast. Duh. It was great! Such a beautiful drive – and Jim was Mr. French Driver by then, so he was in his element. (He might disagree, but this is my journal, so I get to say.)

We went through Monaco (old hands at it by this time; no fighting) and then through the town of Menton. We didn’t learn until later that Menton is famous for lemons, so the touristy things you can buy include lemon-themed things. As we drove through the town (it’s really a city, but everything seems so quaint that it’s easy to think of these places as towns) we both agreed that we would come back to Menton to check it out.

We got to San Remo and I could immediately see that my “looking into it” earlier had been totally insufficient – a church that sounded intriguing, a garden, etc. I had printed out pages from the Web that described these places, but we had no map with us, no way to orient ourselves to find them. We followed some signs for parking and wedged our car into a space, guided by the guy who was manning the parking area.

Of note: The day before, when we were in Nice, parking the car had cost us almost € 20. Parking for about the same amount of time in San Remo was € 3.

We got something to eat and wandered around a little bit before deciding that we just had to get a map. We found ourselves in an alley that led to a courtyard kind of area where it didn’t look like any cars could pass through, but there was plenty of activity – a few restaurants, some shops where people were living in apartments above, a church, and so on. Jim took a number of photos. Once again, it was the Noon to 2pm time, and most shops were closed, but we found an open tobacco shop (I would call it a convenience store, without any gas pumps) and bought a few postcards and a map. Jim and I could finally figure out where we were! However, none of the places we wanted to see were marked on the map – rather, it gave us some street names (and many other small streets without any names on them) and we could locate the streets where these attractions would be.

I found myself feeling like I wasn’t a very good traveler. Someone else might have done research about San Remo (or Nice, or any of the other places we went or thought about going to) in a different (read: better) way. I’m not a particularly good researcher – I get impatient to “do” rather than “prepare to do.” When we got back to Cap d’Ail from San Remo, I told Jim about these feelings and he – being an excellent researcher – took over – which was great! We had a couple of travel books with us and got those out, along with our map of the south of France and he started research. We didn’t yet know what Pat and Tony would want to do, so he just started identifying places we might want to go, with or without them. I found a weight lifted from me – not that it had ever been specifically on me, but our previous vacations had all been planned by me. But they hadn’t really been the go-go-go vacations this one was meant to be – they had all been more the bring-lots-of-book-and-lie-on-the-beach types of vacations. No real planning needed. So while it seemed like I had done enough by determining that this town might be good to go to and that museum looked cool, it wasn’t enough – you had to know more about how to get there and what road these places were on. And Jim was the man for the job!