Day 1178 (Sunday) 30^th August 2020

We went to Le Phare last night and there were a few more people than there have been the last few weeks and we had some fun with Christian and Simon. The restaurant next door had no customers whatsoever all evening – it’s so sad to watch these small businesses struggling after all the months of closure due to the virus and now the tourists are going home because the kids are back in school on Tuesday.

  

As much as I resent the tourists bringing the virus back to us after months of behaving ourselves I feel very sad for these small businesses.

Badger attacked me big time this morning and wouldn’t stop until I got up – as annoying as this is it still makes me laugh. As soon as I got up he went to sleep in my wardrobe!

We walked through the citadel to La Darse where we met Dee for lunch in the Happy Whale.

We saw this gorgeous little yellow car in the carpark – it’s so cute!

The café was packed and luckily Dee had arrived earlier than us and was the first person in the queue waiting to be seated. Dee had a chicken kebab, Huw had the loup (sea bass) and I had lamb and we all thoroughly enjoyed our lunch.

We had an ice cream on the way home and it was delicious, Huw had his usual pistachio and I had my favourite coconut. At around 5pm we got on Kisbee and rode up to the Moyenne corniche to get a glimpse at the Tour de France. It was a bit windy this afternoon which changes the colour of the sea and it looks Caribbean milky blue.

A lot of the roads are closed because of the race so we rode up as far as we could and then walked the rest of the way. There were some people there but it wasn’t too busy at all but we had to wear masks anyway.

 

We got there a bit early and had to wait for almost an hour but we weren’t complaining when this was the view.

This is port Sante, the one we look at from our balcony

When the cyclists arrived it was a lot more exciting than we’d anticipated and everyone clapped and cheered every cyclist and the atmosphere was really lovely.

 

This morning Huw found some information online regarding the Tour de France and Eze and Villefranche …

Col d'Eze (507 m)

Twice ridden in the Tour de France, in 1953 and 2009, Col d'Eze has really become a cycling classic thanks to Paris-Nice, since the Race to the Sun climbed it 34 times. The greatest riders ever won at the top: Eddy Merckx, Raymond Poulidor, Joop Zoetemelk, Stephen Roche, Sean Kelly, Bradley Wiggins or Richie Porte, the last winner at Col d’Eze in 2015. It is logically Sean Kelly, record holder of victories in Paris- Nice, who won most often at Col d'Eze: five times. Briton Bradley Wiggins holds the record for the fastest ascent in 19:12.

KM 157

Èze (Pop: 2,240)

"There is nowhere else a more exotic, more unusual place, more suspended in a vacuum ...", wrote Jean Cocteau about Eze. The poet is just one of the many celebrities to have enjoyed this hilltop and fortified village above Nice. The "Nietzsche path", starting from the seaside, winds its way down a steep slope to the hilltop village. It is said that Nietzsche, living in Nice at the end of his life, sick, used to walk up the path and was inspired by it to write the third part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Popular French actor Francis Blanche also had a house in Eze and is buried there. Novelist Maurice Blanchot or Bono, the singer of U2, are among the other celebrities to have lived in Èze.
The castle ruins, sheltered by a pretty exotic garden, recall the history of the village: from the Iron Age around 220 BC. AD, local people found shelter on the rock of Eze. Some fragments of walls erected in cyclopean apparatus in the village testify to this early occupation. The castle was built in the second half of the 12th century by the Eze family. To keep it, the Counts of Provence and then the Dukes of Savoy relied on valiant and experienced officers called the Castellans. The garden and its ruins are always worth a visit. This is also the case for the neo-classical village church, built in the 18th century on the foundations of a 12th century church, it is dedicated to Notre-Dame de l’Assomption.

Error! Filename not specified.Une rue charmante du village © Getty/Randrey

Villefranche-sur-Mer (Pop : 5,100)

Former military port of the House of Savoy, which had no other access to the sea before the construction of the port of Nice, Villefranche-sur-Mer has retained a nautical know-how appreciated by lovers of maritime heritage. The city is today a renowned seaside resort where many celebrities reside or have lived. Rock stars Elton John and Tina Turner have houses there, while the Rolling Stones recorded their most famous album, Exile on Main Street in Villefranche.
The city retains an important civil and religious heritage from its past. The citadel of Saint-Elme, built in the 16th century by Emmanuel-Philibert of Savoy, now houses the town hall, but also the museums dedicated to sculptor Antoniucci Volti, to paintings from the Goetz-Bousmeester collection, ceramics from the Roux collection and the memories of the 24th Battalion of Alpine Hunters.

Among the other places of interest in Villefranche, the port of Darse and Rue Obscure, a covered street of 130 metres dating from 1260, are worth noting.

The religious heritage is dominated by the Saint-Michel church, built in the 14th century and altered in Savoy Baroque style in the 18th century, and the pretty Saint-Pierre chapel, whose frescoes are by Jean Cocteau. On the territory of the municipality is also the Villa Leopolda, built at the beginning of the 20th century for Leopold II of Belgium and sometimes presented as the most expensive villa in the world. More about this house tomorrow.