Moving to Cagnes-sur-Mer

After 10 great months in Nice, it’s time to finally move on… Mathilde is going to start working in Sophia Antipolis, so the commute would just be too long…

We decided upon a nice little town between Nice and Antibes called Cagnes-sur-Mer. That way, both of us have a reasonably short commute, and we’re still close to Nice, and still by the sea ;-). We found a nice flat right in the centre, in a newly completed building, for a pretty reasonable price (well, reasonable for this part of the world, anyway…).




After the usual administrative hassle that seems to be required for almost anything in France (needed to get proof that you are steadily employed, insurance, two guarantors etc) – we were finally set to move! So we got up early Wednesday morning, drove down to Cagnes, and picked up the rental van. We had enlisted the help of Hannu, Sami and Mikko (my trusty compatriots here on the Riviera) for the evening, but optimistically figured we could easily do a couple of van-loads during the day, and only leave the trickiest and heaviest things to the evening.


Wrong… Put it like this, 3 van-loads (as well as a few beers and pizzas) later, about midnight, we still hadn’t managed to empty the flat. At least, thanks to the help of the guys, we had managed to move all the heavy stuff).







So Thursday turned out to be a day of hard work as well, as I drove between Nice and Cagnes with my parents Scenic packed to the roof with boxes, bags and odd bits of furniture (it’s actually amazing how much you can squeeze into that car) while Mathilde was packing the last boxes and cleaning up the flat. But, by midnight, we were finished!

Of course the work was still not finished – the next few days (the first two without electricity) we had to unpack everything, install the washing machine (at times some nasty thoughts involving guns and whoever designed the bloody kitchen came to my mind – that bloody thing took hours to get into place), get a fridge changed (it mysteriously stopped working after the move…) etc. But we got there in the end!