Or so said our GPS with the Brittish accent when we arrived to Monaco. What a fun little country. A Grand Prix, a royal palace, and a casino, what more does a country need. We spent a day here, of course two hours of that was lunch, and then headed back to Cannes for our film festival.
Someone was kind enough to snap a picture of us together. This was in the palace gardens. Rob has way more pics of this than me.
When we arrived we parked in Monte Carlo, and decided to walk to the palace, in Monaco-ville (there are only two cities). This is the palace way off in the distance…at the top of yet another hill.
When we were driving in we realized we were on part of the race track. I really can’t imagine taking this winding mountainous road course at close to 100mph. But race they do. The Grand Prix was the weekend before, so the track was in various stages of tear down. Here are some of the stands.
And the safety fence looking uphill.
We stopped to rest and take lots of pictures along the way.
And finally reached our destination! Just in time for the changing of the guard. Quite the ceremony.
We did take the guided tour of the palace. Alas, no pictures allowed. We have decided that all houses should have an inner courtyard – it really cools the place off. And the throne room is tiny.
We explored the town around the palace, ate lunch (see previous post) and saw where Princess Grace is buried. It was a nice walk through the palace gardens back down the mountain to Monte Carlo, where we went to the famous casino.
It was totally worth the 10 Euros each to get in and the 10 Euros Rob played in the slot machine because he WON! 50 Euros! What we liked about this casino is no smoking (you can smoke everywhere else, but not in here), the slot machines were quiet – they only rang when you won, and that wasn’t so loud, and REAL COINS come out of the machine. We decided to trade in all the 2E coins for a large bill. See Rob with his winnings.
And that is our trip to France. I’m sure I’ve left out plenty, but we are off again today for vacation phase 2 – a cruise to the Bahamas. I will post the video of the Changing of the Guard when we return.