Perched villages & windy mountain roads

I decided to take Monday off so we could show our friends some of the pretty villages around Nice. By now, quite a few people had left, so we could manage with two cars. So we started off by renting a car for Winston (after failing to rent one at Nice airport with Nick).

Eventually, with car hire and breakfast out of the way & sorted, we set off towards Peille and Peillon, possibly our favourite perched villages on the Cote d'Azur (since they are near Nice and not very touristy). Driving along the scenic if somewhat windy mountain roads (I think Winston in particular enjoyed tackling them with his feisty Fiat Panda) through the Nice hinterlands, we started off with the small and picturesque Peillon - a real picture-perfect example of a Provencal village. What I like about Peillon, is that there are no tourist shops or restaurants in the village at all (a choice of the local population, apparently).



Having seen Peillon (which to be honest doesn't take very long at all), we headed on towards Peille, which is the "big brother" of Peillon (Peillon means little Peille). Peille is a bit busier than Peillon, and there are some restaurants here, so we stopped for lunch here. After this, it was time for us to take Sinhung to the airport - so we left Winston & co. to continue the road trip for a while on their own.



In the evening, we all met up in Mougins (or Muggins, as Nick insisted on calling it), near Cannes. It's also a village very close to my heart, due to the fact that it's (so I've heard) basically impossible not to eat well in this place. All the houses in the village seem to be either restaurants or artist's studios (in the interwar period, Mougins was discovered by surrealist painters such as Cocteau and Picasso, who spent much of his time here between 1961 until his death in 1973). We visited the Musee de la Photographie, there was a cool exhibition about Italian movie stars and Hitchcock there (as well as a lot of photos of Picasso). After this injection of culture, we nourished ourselves (very well, if somewhat expensively) in Aux Trois Etages.