Lepod's Blog

After leaving the hospital, suitably braced for the trip so to speak, we took the Citroën up the east coast of Spain to a little seaside resort town in France called Sète. In Sète we found a comfortable hotel near the beach, and wandered to a nearby restaurant for dinner. I ordered Moules et Frites, and Pauline ordered Carpaccio. This was unfortunate for her, as Carpaccio turned out to be  huge plate of thin slices of raw marinated beef. Luckily the waitress was very nice about it, and gave her another choice. When we came to pay the bill, she did not charge us for the Carpaccio, saying she had eaten it herself instead! So we gave her a big tip. It was quite nice to be back in France, it is an odd feeling being in a country where you really can’t understand the language. We could manage to read a bit of spanish but it wasn’t easy to understand the spoken language.

The next day was a fairly big drive,  about 7 hours, driving past Marseille, Cannes and Monaco. Around Monaco we were driving down a mountain pass for a while, it was spectacular, with great views of the coast, and the mountains, and the rich people in their fancy cars off to do a bit of gambling no doubt. Inexplicably, once across the border into Italy, the drivers all became far more flamboyant, and drove much faster. I had to concentrate reasonably hard and pay attention to people coming up behind us at a rate of knots. We arrived in Milan about 7:30 at night, and the driving in the city was also fairly exciting. I can’t say I enjoyed it too much at that point of the day. But we got there in time for Pauline’s conference, we found the hotel, checked in and I could put my feet up with a certain amount of relief. Of course, for Pauline, the work was about to begin.