The Crossing

We didnt quite reach France on Thursday, rather we made it just short of Ventimiglia as we spent our morning in Albenga doing laundry and other errands. Ventimiglia provided one of the quietest campsites yet as well as so,e conversation with a couple from Missouri who had quit their jobs and were traveling around Europe. A quiet canpsite that is until around 3am when it began to pour down rain on our tents. This has happened one other night and was over by the morning, but this was not our luck on this occassion! By 5am Nathans tent had collapsed when the stake pulled out of the wet ground and Allens tent had an inch of standing water inside and it was still raining...we finally got up around seven and pulled all of our gear into the only dry place, the bathroom, and were packing up when it finally stopped raining. No more rain fell on us until we reached our end of the ride in Antibes France at which point we were forced to take the only room left in town (thank you Cannes Film Festival) at a price much outside our budgets.

Now the rain while it bookended our day was not the story of the day, rather leaving Italy and crossing into France at Menton where, despite Duvals best guess we did not trade our bikes for a car, but rather picked up a nice downhill ride into Monte Carlo and Monaco where we stopped to catch our bearings. Climbing out of Monte Carlo we found beautiful cycling tracks leading through Nice where we stopped for lunch as the sun made an appearance and tasted our first really good beer of the trip, Leffe, a Belgian Style Abbey Ale, and may I just say GOODBYE Peroni and Moretti! More cycling track our of Nice all the way to Antibes, a beautiful ride!

Today on through Cannes and likely into the interior in search of some good French wine!