Life's a Beach!

April 6th--We had a lazy day by the beach today. Mike was still not feeling very good today so I took the kids down to the beach. The weather was wonderful! It was nice to be able to sit by the water without all the wind. (We experienced a lot of wind at the beach in Spain) The kids and I enjoyed our time at the beach. The beach here is covered with all rocks, no sand. Abby and Austin spent a lot of time throwing rocks into the Mediterranean Sea. Austin was in heaven...he has become totally obsessed with rocks and will put them in his pockets. Also, we aren't far from the Nice Airport so we set at the beach watching airplanes taking off over the water.

April 7th--Since we have been taking it easy for the past few days, we really haven't mapped out our agenda for our stay in Nice. So, today we decided to do the Riviera Walk from the Promenade des Anglais to Castle Hill, a 4 mile long walk. We took the bus along the promenade and got off by the Hotel Negresco. Hotel Negresco is Nice's finest hotel and has the most expensive rooms at 460 Euros. The hotel's entrance is very obvious with it's pink dome looking over the promenade. We tried to go inside to take a look, but we were denied access. I guess we don't look like 460 euros a night people at this point. So, instead we began our seaside stroll doing a lot of people watching along the way. It's hard not to check out the Europeans sunbathing. (Sometimes it is like a train wreck... you can't stop watching) After almost getting beat to death by the wind (yes, the wonderful wind was back today), we darted into a restaurant for lunch. We went with something less local today and were maybe looking for a feel of back of home as we chose Buffalo Grill. It was a lot like a Friday's, but it got us out of the wind. In fact, we were at lunch long enough we forgot about the wind and headed back out to continue our walk towards Castle Hill. Anyway, back to some information about the promenade...along the walkway, you will encounter many people bike riding, rollerblading or running. We had to avoid the bike lanes along the promenade. We continued our walk onto quai des Etats-Unis ("quay of the United States"). This name was given as a tip-of-the-cap to the Americans for finally entering World War I in 1917. There's also a monumental war memorial sculpted out of the rock in honor of the thousands of local boys who died serving their country in World Wars I and II. After enjoying some brilliant views from this spot, we headed back toward the elevator entrance to Castle Hill. We took the elevator up to Castle Hill. We just didn't think that the kids would make the climb up after all the walking along the promenade. Once up on Castle Hill, we enjoyed the playground and the unbelievable views over Nice, the port, the foothills of the Alps and the Mediterranean. We also got an excellent view of the airport runways and watched a plane land and take-off. (Just some background on Castle Hill...Nice was founded on this hill. The residents were crammed onto the hilltop until the 12th century, as it was too risky to live in the flatlands below.) Instead of taking the elevator down, we did go down the stairs and repeated our walk along the promenade back the opposite direction. We love people watching and we got a lot of that today.