Tuesday - October 3, 2006
We were the first ones down in the restaurant for breakfast. It was kind of quirky, but there was proscuitto, so it was ok. We packed up the car and drove west towards southern France. As we got close to La Spezia and the Cinque Terra region we got off the freeway and drove through the mountainous roads right along the coast. It was a like a roller coaster. We even saw these wild carts on single tracks that went down the steep mountainsides, apparently used for bringing the grape harvest up the road.
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After driving into Levanto we got back on the freeway and headed up to Portofino, which is a very cute seaside town. We had some espresso and then headed northwest on the freeway. The road was basically a series of tunnels and bridges that punched through the steep mountains running out to the sea. We must have driven through 50 to 70 tunnels, many of them over half a mile in length. Quite an engineering feat, though it did drive Linguo crazy ("lost satellite reception" was heard when a tunnel was over half a mile long).
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We arrived in Nice, and after a bit of construction traffic, found the Hi Hotel. It was really funky; our room was the "white and white" room, fittingly done completely in white. We walked down along the sea to a small plaza and had a seafood dinner, then walked back along the water and headed to bed (after lowering the motorized shutters!).