Isabelle on the Cote d'Azur

About one week from now, Flore and Christian, good friends of ours from our stay in England, are planning to get married in the Alps. Due to some complicated practical arrangements, our other good friend from our stay in England, Isabelle, had decided to come down for a few days down to the Cote d’Azur before making her way up to the Alps - but not with us, but rather with OIivier and Rapaelle, who were also heading down to the Cote for a few days. But Isabelle was staying at our flat. (I told you, the arrangements were complicated!)

So to cut a long story short, we picked up Isabelle at Antibes train station, where she arrived at Sunday night after a rather long trip from Paris. Which meant we had Monday to spend with Isabelle, as we were planning to head off towards the Alps on Tuesday.

As I mentioned, our friends Olivier and Rapahele were also on the Cote, so after considering various options, we decided to all meet up in Vence for lunch. Vence is a pretty nice Provencal town, located conveniently between Cagnes-sur-Mer (where we live) and Greolieres (where Ollie and Raphaele were staying). We started off our visit by walking around the lovely old town – very typically Provencal, and very well preserved – with its medieval gates intact.

After our stroll through the historic town center, we decided it was time to eat. We ended up going with the nr. 1 restaurant on Tripadvisor, Les Lavandes – a very good choice indeed. It’s a rather small establishment run by a couple, very nicely located on a lovely little square. The service is friendly, and the food is really great, all prepared from fresh ingredients. It’s true that the service was a little bit slow, but that is to be expected with one person waiting the tables and one person in the kitchen (at least the waiting means the food is prepared, rather than heated in the microwave oven…).

After lunch, us and Isabelle headed off to kill off some of those just-acquired calories by doing a bit of hiking near Vence. The area of Vence (more specifically, towards Col de Vence) is really excellent for hiking, we’ve done quite a few walks over there. This time, we decided to do the Plan des Noves walk, which we’ve already done, about 5 years ago. It’s a nice little walk taking in some pretty nice views, especially towards the Baou de Saint-Jeannette, with some nice rough terrain to cross. We took a wrong turn at one point, but thankfully managed to find our way again – so we ended up doing a bit of an improvised variant of the hike in the end. Anyway, a very pleasant and scenic way to get rid of a few calories!

In the evening, we took it easy, and had dinner home, catching up on old times (we discovered some old photos and videos from our years in the UK which we watched with great amusement!).