More on Sunny Sunday and Monday
Mar. 25th, 2014 11:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWhen the Mediterranean on the Cote d'Azur is beautiful, there isn't much in the world to match it, and on Sunday and Monday I was lucky enough to get to see it at its best. I remember assuming that when I went to Cyprus things would be similar. Instead I got to see a murky green sludge (and beaches stinking of rotting seaweed). The Med's colour, clearly, is not constant.
Because I had climbed to the ancient Chateau by a diffferent route from normal, I took I slightly different route at the top. That brought me to this view:
That's the lead-up to the war memorial. TBH, the war memorial is a little bit overdone. What seems perpetually significant in the short term can seem less so with history. Even now, with participants in one of the wars very much alilve, one begins to ask the question whether the tragic deaths in this war were for any reason more important than the other tragic deaths suffered in centuries previously or that will be suffered in centuries to come.
Below is a picture of the point from which I took the picture above.
I had previously wondered whether to take my short coastal walk, but these clouds put me off:
As it happens, the rain held off -- dumping tons of water on the other side of the mountains, I guess. As in the UK, it has been a mild winter here, and no snow remains on the mountain peaks. The last time I was here earlyish in the year, the snow was still very much evident.
I always enjoy looking at these flats. Owners in the distant past appear to have created gardens on the cliff face, reachable only by little bridges.
This is not an unusual situation for front doors on coastal properties between Nice and Villefrance-sur-mer. Four-storey blocks are created which have street entrances facing towards the sea at the bottom, and street entrances facing away from the sea on the fourth floor (but a different street, 60 feet higher than the ground-floor street). The street entrance on the fourth floor is accessed by a bridge about 10 feet long.
Because of the threat of rain, I returned to the flat and read. I stayed up late into the night, though, working out how to access my home emails via Outlook on this laptop. Previously I had only been able to do so via webmail.
I managed it in the end, after three or four hours. You might recall me writing on Facebook that I had lost two weeks of emails from the server because the default on Outlook is to wipe stuff from the server once it has been downloaded (and changing this default is no simple matter in Outlook 2007, unless you know exactly what to do).
That reminds me of one of the more irritating habits of many IT people. When you say that something is hard to do, they say "What do you mean? All you have to do is go to Tools, Account Settings, highlight your email account, click "Change", go to "Advanced" and then say "keep email on server for 'x' number of days. How hard is that?"
By this principle, of course, it should be easy to use anyone's debit card to extract cash from an ATM, since all you have to do is key in four digits.
It's a complete miscomprehension of the difference between the ease of something when you already know how to do it, and the difficulty of it when you do not.
+++++++
So, Monday dawned and I managed to get going by 1.15pm, more than an hour earlier than the previous day!
Once again, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. The weather was gloriously sunny. And this time I had remembered by sun protection cream! The heat was of the kind that, when in the sun, the jacket had to come on, but the second you were out of the sun, it had to go on again!
On the way I took a picture of what used to be the bus station, but which is now the posh new park:
I had initially planned a complex coastal walk that starts at "Pointe du Gaton" off Blvd Princess Grace, and leads all the way to Villefranche at Residence Le Rochambeau. It's a tough hike up and down rocks on what used to be a not-very-well-maintained trail. However, it's also a heavily exposed route, and with the sun nearly at its height, I decided that it might be better to try it on a less sunny day.
(Here's a link to a picture that I took of part of that walk back in March 2011, when I last tried it).
https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/t1.0-9/208421_1943432986701_235556_n.jpg
Instead I decided to go for the "safer" walk around Cap Ferrat, which has been touristified into a rather simple trail (albeit with a lot of ups and downs on now carefully maintained steps).
So I got off the 81 bus at the Passable stop and headed down the road to the coast. It was looking particularly pleasant today. Not even much breeze down here in the cove (it would get stronger as I headed towards the southerly point of Cap Ferrrat)
I walked past the private Lido residences, and then, just as I got to the steps, I saw a barrier and the sign "Forbidden Passage". No explanation. Was it the rain on Sunday had made it dangerous? Were there works going on? When I was younger I might have ignored it and experimented. But, instead, I meekly turned around and decided that I would walk back to Nice.
That is a fair hike, but I knew that there were some good photo-opportunities on the way that I had not previously been able to exploit, because I had been on the bus.
So, back I trekked. For the first time I was using my Asus tablet and Runkeeper to check my route and distance. This only has wifi, but GPS is independent of that and of roaming charges.
Some pictures from along the way:
Below, the tunnel and a part of Villefranche-sur-mer
Below, a view of Cap Ferrat. I would quite like the place with the pool, please.
An interesting place to have a garage
Villefrance-sur-mer
Trees
I got back to the flat by 4.15pm, and I'd covered nearly eight miles. A reasonable hike, but without much climbing or descent, so my legs were not suffering too badly.
I went for another stroll in the evening. As I approached the central park I thought that Nice had achieved an incredible irony. They paved over the old river all the way from the coast to about a mile north-east of town, and then they put in an artificial lake in exactly the same spot!
But, once again, my eyes were deceiving me. The cleaners had been out in force and they had just sprayed the walkway with a large amount of water, which had yet to drain away or dry out.
Nice was very quiet on Monday evening. Many places were shut and at 9.30pm there were not that many people around, even on the restaurant capital of Nice, the Rue de France.
_____________________
Because I had climbed to the ancient Chateau by a diffferent route from normal, I took I slightly different route at the top. That brought me to this view:
That's the lead-up to the war memorial. TBH, the war memorial is a little bit overdone. What seems perpetually significant in the short term can seem less so with history. Even now, with participants in one of the wars very much alilve, one begins to ask the question whether the tragic deaths in this war were for any reason more important than the other tragic deaths suffered in centuries previously or that will be suffered in centuries to come.
Below is a picture of the point from which I took the picture above.
I had previously wondered whether to take my short coastal walk, but these clouds put me off:
As it happens, the rain held off -- dumping tons of water on the other side of the mountains, I guess. As in the UK, it has been a mild winter here, and no snow remains on the mountain peaks. The last time I was here earlyish in the year, the snow was still very much evident.
I always enjoy looking at these flats. Owners in the distant past appear to have created gardens on the cliff face, reachable only by little bridges.
This is not an unusual situation for front doors on coastal properties between Nice and Villefrance-sur-mer. Four-storey blocks are created which have street entrances facing towards the sea at the bottom, and street entrances facing away from the sea on the fourth floor (but a different street, 60 feet higher than the ground-floor street). The street entrance on the fourth floor is accessed by a bridge about 10 feet long.
Because of the threat of rain, I returned to the flat and read. I stayed up late into the night, though, working out how to access my home emails via Outlook on this laptop. Previously I had only been able to do so via webmail.
I managed it in the end, after three or four hours. You might recall me writing on Facebook that I had lost two weeks of emails from the server because the default on Outlook is to wipe stuff from the server once it has been downloaded (and changing this default is no simple matter in Outlook 2007, unless you know exactly what to do).
That reminds me of one of the more irritating habits of many IT people. When you say that something is hard to do, they say "What do you mean? All you have to do is go to Tools, Account Settings, highlight your email account, click "Change", go to "Advanced" and then say "keep email on server for 'x' number of days. How hard is that?"
By this principle, of course, it should be easy to use anyone's debit card to extract cash from an ATM, since all you have to do is key in four digits.
It's a complete miscomprehension of the difference between the ease of something when you already know how to do it, and the difficulty of it when you do not.
+++++++
So, Monday dawned and I managed to get going by 1.15pm, more than an hour earlier than the previous day!
Once again, I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. The weather was gloriously sunny. And this time I had remembered by sun protection cream! The heat was of the kind that, when in the sun, the jacket had to come on, but the second you were out of the sun, it had to go on again!
On the way I took a picture of what used to be the bus station, but which is now the posh new park:
I had initially planned a complex coastal walk that starts at "Pointe du Gaton" off Blvd Princess Grace, and leads all the way to Villefranche at Residence Le Rochambeau. It's a tough hike up and down rocks on what used to be a not-very-well-maintained trail. However, it's also a heavily exposed route, and with the sun nearly at its height, I decided that it might be better to try it on a less sunny day.
(Here's a link to a picture that I took of part of that walk back in March 2011, when I last tried it).
https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash2/t1.0-9/208421_1943432986701_235556_n.jpg
Instead I decided to go for the "safer" walk around Cap Ferrat, which has been touristified into a rather simple trail (albeit with a lot of ups and downs on now carefully maintained steps).
So I got off the 81 bus at the Passable stop and headed down the road to the coast. It was looking particularly pleasant today. Not even much breeze down here in the cove (it would get stronger as I headed towards the southerly point of Cap Ferrrat)
I walked past the private Lido residences, and then, just as I got to the steps, I saw a barrier and the sign "Forbidden Passage". No explanation. Was it the rain on Sunday had made it dangerous? Were there works going on? When I was younger I might have ignored it and experimented. But, instead, I meekly turned around and decided that I would walk back to Nice.
That is a fair hike, but I knew that there were some good photo-opportunities on the way that I had not previously been able to exploit, because I had been on the bus.
So, back I trekked. For the first time I was using my Asus tablet and Runkeeper to check my route and distance. This only has wifi, but GPS is independent of that and of roaming charges.
Some pictures from along the way:
Below, the tunnel and a part of Villefranche-sur-mer
Below, a view of Cap Ferrat. I would quite like the place with the pool, please.
An interesting place to have a garage
Villefrance-sur-mer
Trees
I got back to the flat by 4.15pm, and I'd covered nearly eight miles. A reasonable hike, but without much climbing or descent, so my legs were not suffering too badly.
I went for another stroll in the evening. As I approached the central park I thought that Nice had achieved an incredible irony. They paved over the old river all the way from the coast to about a mile north-east of town, and then they put in an artificial lake in exactly the same spot!
But, once again, my eyes were deceiving me. The cleaners had been out in force and they had just sprayed the walkway with a large amount of water, which had yet to drain away or dry out.
Nice was very quiet on Monday evening. Many places were shut and at 9.30pm there were not that many people around, even on the restaurant capital of Nice, the Rue de France.
_____________________
