Walking, eating, drinking - the usual stuff...

If you’ve spent a bit of time on this blog, you’ll have noticed a lot of my blog entries start with something along the lines of “As the skies were blue as often, we decided it would be a good day to go for a walk…”. Well, the way the weather has been on the Cote d’Azur the last few weeks, there hasn’t been much reason to start the blog entries like that recently… But in spite of the less than beautiful weather, we decided to go for a walk anyway – we’re planning to go on a walking holiday to Mongolia in about a month so a bit of practice wouldn’t go amiss, I would say!

This time we picked a walk near the Massif d’Esterel, which is one of our favourite places for a bit of walking. The ambitious objective was to scale the dizzying heights (er, 287 meters) of Mont St-Martin. The walk took us past a less-than-picturesque chapel (it looked more like a graffiti-covered bunker from world war 2 than a religious edify), through a quarry, and finally into the Massif d’Esterel. After a rather steep climb up to Mont St-Martin, we rewarded ourselves with a picnic lunch, enjoying the nice view… The rest of the walk was easy going – although we actually managed to get lost and ended up on the Route National 7. Fortunately, there was a footpath along the road, which took us back to the starting point.


Once back home, the sun even made an appearance, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to try out our (communal ;-) swimming pool – really nice. In the evening the plan was to meet up for dinner with Mikko and Sami (who were playing their last hockey game for the season), and then have a few drinks in Ma Nolan’s (where else?). Having had my most expensive pint of Guinness ever (13 bloody euros, couldn’t believe it – me and Mikko made the most of our pints, you can be sure of that!) and a nice dinner at Safari’s, it was time to catch the train. So no Ma Nolan’s this time (tell you what though - next time I'm having my Guinness there and not at "Les 3 Diables").

On Sunday we were planning to do another walk, this time near Gourdon. But as ominous dark clouds gathered around the Plateau de Cavillore (which was our destination), we aborted the walk. As a lighter alternative, we decided to walk down the Chemin de Paradis (a very steep footpath which leads from the bottom of the Loup valley up to Gourdon – breathtakingly beautiful of breath-stealing hard work, depending on how you want to look at it…), and then back up! After that we felt we had more than deserved an ice-cream…

Not sure we’re quite ready for Mongolia yet, though…