Travelbug

Hermes Travelbug with the red rocks of his new home.

Weekends

Last weekend we drove down to the Esterel to deposit a geocaching travelbug into its goal cache. It was Ben's first geocaching trip. We climbed up to the top of a hill with a military lighthouse then clambered down through prikly brush and over red rocks to get back on the track of the cache. It reminded us all of Australian bushwalking. What made it French was the number of people about, the several rockclimbers in sight of the cache and the castelated tower on a little island just off the coast. We had a very pleasant dinner in the Coin de la Rue in Valbonne afterwards.

This weekend we explored Monte Carlo for the first time, taking shops including a huge fnac music and electronics shop and numerous luxury goods shops, the casino and associated cars, the harbour and boats. Back in Villeneuve Loubet we finally checked out one of our local non-Asian restaurants and ended up with a delicious orgy of seafood (mussels, calamari, prawns and whitebait) and the frites that I was craving - yum.

Hiking

We were on a goat track up high on one of our latest walks in the Southern Alps. This one left from the Sanctuaire de Santa Anna just across the border into Italy. The little alpine lakes were pretty but the area was littered with WW2 bunkers and rusty barbed wire. I ate several delicious handfuls of raspberries from the bushes lining the track. We did another walk on Sunday after camping in a delightful all-season campground at Isola. The walk from St Etienne la Tinée wasn't as nice as the previous day as it was hotter down lower and three quarters of the route was on a steep gravel road. The free fruit compensation wasn't there either as animals, probably pigs, had stripped the bushes of raspberries and most of the leaves.

Beach

I was wetting my toes on our local Villeneuve Loubet Plage, just so I could say I'd done it. It has almost been warm enough again in the last few days for full immersion but it probably won't happen. Those pebbles make for a pretty uncomfortable swimming experience.

Necklace

As promised, a photo that features my new necklace, bought in the Perigord town of Sarlat for my last birthday - the next one is in three weeks!