Old Hands, part 14

Soon it was time again for Semana Santa (Holy Week), the big spring vacation. We had decided to go to Provence, and to run across the border into Italy for a few days, too. “I want to take the kids someplace really impactful, someplace they’ll remember,” I said.

“What about Venice?” Mike suggested. It was a great idea, but it looked a little too far away from where we’d be concentrating our time.

“Pisa?” he said. That looked a little more feasible, according to the map, and the tower should be a memorable sight, I thought. So we added it to the plan.

We flew from Madrid to Marseille on a Saturday at the end of March. It was windy when we got off the plane—“Le Mistral,” said some elderly Frenchmen returning from Spain, referring to the famed wind of the area.

We picked up our rental car, a gray Toyota Carina diesel hatchback, and drove about two hours through the sunny, hilly scenery on the way to Grasse, just north of Cannes. It was in a flower-growing and perfume-manufacturing area, so we stopped in to see the Fragonard factory. It was just a tourist thing—it made only enough perfume to sell to the visitors that went there—but there were interesting displays of the manufacturing process, and the kids liked it.

We had lunch at the McDonald’s around the corner, to make the girls happy, and I got a salad with a little packet of Dijon vinaigrette. After one taste of my salad I said to Mike, “This is as good as any Dijon dressing I’ve ever had, and we’re in McDonald’s! How come we can’t get this at home?”

From Grasse we drove down to Cannes and followed the coastal road to Nice, past dozens of hotels and apartment buildings. Not that pretty, I thought, though the Mediterranean looked beautiful. I was coming to the conclusion that coastal towns in general were ugly to me, with their masses of condos oriented to the beach. I found the inland towns prettier, and usually less crowded.

Our hotel in Nice was truly a dump. I generally went for the cheap on these trips, but it was a strategy that was failing. We had two ugly rooms with marginally clean bathrooms. The room where Mike and I would sleep was right next to the lobby, and its walls did not go all the way up to the ceiling, so we could clearly hear every sound as people came and went near the front desk.

Eager to be out of the rooms, we went out right away for a walk to Place Massena, the central square, and looked at the Palais de Justice and the pebbly beach. We ate at a restaurant nearby.

The next day we drove to Nice’s Musée des Beaux Arts, housed in a small palace, which had a lovely collection of French paintings. Then we hit the highway toward Italy, switching to the coastal road once we crossed the border. We drove through several Ligurian towns along the coast, stopping in San Remo for lunch on the beach. The weather was sunny and cool, and the views of the blue Mediterranean on one side and the steep mountains rising on the other were striking. As we drove on we found that the road was all viaducts and tunnels—no flat land anywhere. We stopped again in Cervo, a medieval hilltop town. It was getting colder and starting to drizzle, but we climbed up to the town’s church, shopped for souvenirs nearby, and got the kids some ice cream.

Then we drove on toward Genoa, which was to be our base for a few days. It was Sunday, and the Genovese were returning from their weekend trips, so the traffic was miserable, but we found our hotel—ugly but more comfortable than the one in Nice—and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. It was just a neighborhood trattoria, but the food was marvelous. Julie and Lisa had the first of several meals of trofiette al pesto—trofiette are short noodles—a Genovese specialty.

The next day we went to Pisa, south of Genoa, in Tuscany. The tower was really amazing, as we had hoped, and the kids were definitely impressed. “It leans way out there!” Lisa said, astonished. We took a short drive to the charming town of Lucca, where the cathedral boasted columns of different designs—striped, checked, spiral. On the way back to Genoa we stopped in the Cinqueterre, five little fishing towns, each nestled on its own stretch of beach between flanking mountains. In one of the towns we parked at the beach and watched a wetsuited surfer negotiate the lackluster waves.