[Itinerary Page]The Daily Diary of a Wandering Restaurateur
May 1 - Eze-le-Village, Vence
Time to move on again. While getting around to see more of the area is nice, I must say that I rather prefer being in one spot for a week at a time ... perhaps even two or three weeks at a time! But leave we must.
Since we had to be out of the hotel by 10am and were not expected at our next lodging until 5pm, we had most of the day to kill. So after a quick breakfast on the square in Villefranche, we headed up the coast toward Monaco to the town of Eze-le-Village. This is an ancient place whose sole function now is to be a magnet for tourists. That would normally be enough to send us running in the opposite direction but it was still pre-season and we had heard that the place was really worth seeing. It was.
The photos on the following page tell the story better than I ever could but if shopping centers existed in the middle ages, they would probably look a lot like Eze. The chateau in town used to be the summer home of the Swedish royal family. It is now a very posh hotel whose parking lot (several hundred feet below the property itself) was filled with Mercedes, Jaguars and even a Lambourghini! Very sweet!
Then it was off to the town of Vence farther up in the hills to have lunch and poke around its old town. Many of the cities have preserved their medieval centers and in most cases, they provide the only good reason to visit! Newer buildings have no soul and are just boring. The fact that between us we took 99 photos today is evidence that we like the old buildings!
It occurs to me that without a common language, our interaction is often more with the architecture than with the people. We can see the differences between buildings and the "feel" of various areas but it is harder to get a sense of the difference between the people in those areas. We do notice that the Italians generally seem to be more open and fun-loving than the French. Our research continues.
In mid-afternoon we headed off along winding mountain roads hoping to find a gas station before we ran out (we did!), finally rolling into the town of Fayence and the home of Les and Judy Sykes, ATC hosts. After Les retired from the Royal Air Force, they spent several years sailing around the world on their 40' sailboat before finally settling in Provence -- first in Cannes and then outside Fayence.
They suggested that the restaurant at the Flying Club outside of town was "cheap and cheerful," just what we were after tonight. We never would have found this place on our own ... but that's what makes staying with ATC hosts so much more interesting than just tucking into a hotel and trying to figure it out from guidebooks.
Villefranche and Eze-le-Village
© 2006 Restaurant Doctor