Janne and Katja visiting

Time to welcome some visitors again! This time my brother Janne, and his girlfriend Katja, were visiting.

We decided to start the visit by showing them our beautiful hometown, Cagnes-sur-Mer. After picking up our visitors from the airport, and a bit of chilling out at the flat (after all, our guests had gotten up at 5 in the morning to catch their flight), we headed out for a bit of lunch. After trying several restaurants at Haut-de-Cagnes (the old town, where we would normally take our visitors for a meal out) without success, we decided to head to the Kaffe-In, a little eatery by the Hippodrome which is pretty well rated on various web sites. A good choice indeed – the place doesn't look like anything special, and the wait was pretty long (due to the fact that the place was absolutely packed), but the food was really excellent (which is the main thing, right?)

To digest our tasty and filling lunch, we decided to do a bit of cycling, to explore the seaside of Cagnes-sur-Mer. So we rented a few velo belues, and made our way to the Cros de Cagnes – which is the old fishing village of Cagnes. From there, we made our way to the town center, and changed mode of transport, taking the free shuttle bus up to the Haut-de-Cagnes – passing by the busy street market. We stopped for a coffee at the main square of the Haut-de-Cagnes, which was unfortunately being renovated, after which we walked around for a bit, taking in the beautiful medieval cobble-stone streets and well-renovated houses. We finished a rather nice Sunday off with dinner at our place.

The next day, the plan was for me to head out to the Parc National de Mercantour with Janne and Katja. The plan was to visit Alpha – a kind of safari park which houses three packs of wolves. The drive up to Alpha is rather spectacular – the plan was to drive up the Gorges de Vesubie, but the road was closed, so we had to take a bit of a detour. Still, a magnificent drive, taking us past pretty villages, until we finally arrived at our destination.

After checking out a couple of expositions and audio/visual shows dedicated to this much-written about animal, we headed out into the park itself. The idea is basically to follow a marked footpath, with a fence separating visitors from the wolves, which can roam freely in the park behind the fence. Wolves being rather shy animals, we only saw about three of them, resting quietly in the bush. Still, it's quite a special moment, to lock your gaze with one of these beasts. Later on, we were treated to the spectacle of the wolves being fed by the care-takers – and that was indeed quite an impressive sight!

All in all, a very interesting visit, well worth the trip! On the way back, we stopped at Saint-Martin-de-Vesubie, one of the main towns in the Mercantour park. Quite a typical Provencal village, I would say, with a couple of interesting churches which are worth a look.

On Tuesday, I met up with the Janne and Katja, and also my parents (who were back from their rather successful wine and truffle tasting trip to Piedmont) at Antibes for lunch at the Taille de Gueppe – one of our favourite restaurants in Antibes. Their cooking is, rather interestingly, based on the theme of flowers. So all the dishes are basically decorated with flowers of various kinds (all edible, and some of them rather tasty – the main dish had some flowers tasting like oysters for example!). Very much recommended, should you ever find yourselves in Antibes, looking for a restaurant...

On Wednesday night, we headed over for dinner to my parents place, very nice indeed! We were even treated to some truffle-flavoured oil from my parents visit to Piedmont, guess we need to figure out what to cook with that then!
That brought an end to Janne's and Katja's visit, as they were carrying on their journey towards Italy & Tuscany on Thursday. Great to see them again!