Barely had we gotten back from our Christmas break in the West of France, before it was time to attack the next project - the New Year's party we were organising at my parent's place in Antibes. With 14 adults and a few children participating, there was a fair bit of work to do. Thankfully, we got most of the preparations out of the way before our first guests, the honoured Sirs Winston and Philippe, arrived.
We'd prepared a proper Nice dinner for their arrival in the evening (they were in dire need of nourishment, after their 10-hour drive up from Paris), with some nice home-made (not by us!) raviolis and pasta sauce waiting for them. Great fun meeting up with them as always, especially Winston, whom we see regretfully rarely...
The next day, we had a bit of time before heading over to my parents' place in Antibes, so we decided to explore Cagnes for a bit on bike. With the beautiful weather we were having, it was an easy choice... After checking out the seaside, we ended up having a surprisingly good lunch at one of the rather touristy restaurants in Saint-Laurent-du-Var (I say surprisingly, since the place did look like a bit of a tourist trap). After lunch, and a bit of last-minute shopping, it was time to head over to Antibes.
We had quite a few guests from various places attending our little party. There was of course the dynamic duo; Winston and Philippe, as well as Flore, Christian, Nathalie and Patrick (with children, including my dear godson Florian), representing our old friends from England. The locals were represented by Mathilde's colleagues Aurelien and Julie, as well as Mikko, Marianne and Nathalie. And then there was the special Finnish guest star from Holland: Sami (who used to live here in Nice). A pretty good team to welcome 2013, I would say!
And we had a lot of fun, that's for sure. Things kicked off and stayed relatively civilized, until around the time somebody had the idea of having a round of '44 (a very tasty but rather strong concoction containing, amongst other things: home-distilled Calvados, an orange, sugar coffee beans and cloves). Cocktails was the theme of the night, and we did have quite a few... Not enough, in the sense that there was plenty of booze left the next morning. Some of us probably had a few too many (including the writer of this blog post)... Anyway, all in all, I think everybody had a good time, nobody got injured, and there was no substantial damage (in fact, the only material damage was a wine glass) to my parents flat. So I think it would be fair to call the event a success!
The first day of 2013 was spent in recovery mode, as you can probably imagine, mostly watching DVD's...
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