European Vacation Day 5, 6, and 7 - July 2022

 July 14 & 15 - Last day in London, First day in France

Boogs picked our last day in London itinerary. He wanted to go to The British Museum and go back to Boroughs Market for lunch, and end the day at Kensington Gardens. We also had planned to go get our Covid tests (necessary for Air France flights) first thing in the morning before our 11:00 am tickets to the British Museum. My husband slept in, so we got a late start to the day.  We had time to eat breakfast and head out to the museum. We ended up spending 3.5 hours in the museum. There was so much to see. We walked through exhibits about Egypt, China, North America, Greece, and Rome. The Rosetta Stone is in the museum. I really enjoyed walking through, reading information plaques, and seeing the collections.

After the museum, we went for Covid tests. It took quite a while to find a place that could have our results in time for our next day flight to Nice, France. By the time we left the clinic and walked to Boroughs Market, the market was scheduled to close in about 48 minutes. Boogs was very disappointed. He had wanted to try food from a lot of different stalls. Most everything was sold out. He went to five places that had sold out of food before he was able to get a wild boar and coleslaw sandwich. I had a Thai beef dish and my husband had wild boar ravioli. By the time we finished eating, it was too late to go to Kensington Gardens. So we went back to the hotel and went to bed early.

Day 6 of our trip was a travel day. We had to leave the hotel by 11 am. Our flight was not until 6pm. We tried to go to the American Airlines lounge at Heathrow Airport, but it was closed for renovations. It felt like a long wait for our flight. The flight boarded late and was a bit rough. There were two kids who screamed the entire flight, two barking dogs, and a mom who walked her 2 ish year old up and down the aisle. The child kept banging into people and was VERY noisy. I did manage to get this pretty picture of the sun and clouds.

On the positive side, we made it to Nice and were able to pick up our rental car. We did not have a lot of choices, my husband had to take a standard transmission car. It had been a couple of decades since he last drove a standard. It was also a rough drive to Cannes. The GPS was about a second behind where we were on the road. That made it difficult to navigate the multitude of roundabouts and twisty roads. We had to double back several times to make sure we were heading the correct direction. The night was very dark. 

We eventually made it to the correct street in Cannes to pick up our condo key from a lockbox. Unfortunately, my husband passed the lockbox before we realized what it was. He pulled over against a curb and it was then that we discovered that we could not figure out how to put the car in reverse. I walked down half a block to get the key. Then he put the car in neutral while I pushed to get the car out of the spot. After driving in circles on one way streets, we finally found the correct street for our condo. My husband was able to figure out that to put the car in reverse, you have to lift up on a ring around the gear shift. To shift into any other gears, you just had to press the button on the side of the gear shift to move it into gear. 

Once we made it into the parking garage, we struggled to find our condo. The parking garage was labeled level G in the elevator. Our condo was on level 1. So we went up one floor and tried our key on all four doors on that level. The condos did not have any numbers on them. Our directions simply said "level 1, first door to right of elevator and last door on the right". Boogs had a separate small "studio" room on the same hallway as our one bedroom condo. We eventually realized that the building was labeled G for garage, 0 for first floor, and 1 for the second floor. Our next challenge was getting the keys in the locks. Our keys had two separated pieces that looked like this:

They were very finicky. I took this picture from the condo doorway, looking down to Boogs' room.

July 16th (vacation day 7) - It was about 1:30 in the morning by the time I got to sleep. I woke up before 6 while my husband (1 pm) and son (9 am) slept in. I went for a walk around the condo grounds. The views from the back patio of the condo were very nice. There was a gate at the back of the property that led right out to the beach. I could not unlock the gate. Later in the week we found out that the key we were supposed to have for that gate, was not given to us.

We had a very quiet day. We spent the day wandering around Cannes, walking by the beach, eating lunch at an outdoor cafe, grocery shopping, and getting laundry done. I love going to grocery stores in other countries. It is neat to see the different flavors and varieties of food available.

Overall, it was a nice quiet day of recharging and relaxing. At one point in the day, my husband told me I should be in charge of planning what we would do in France. That caught me off guard. I planned and prepaid for the tours Boogs and I did in London. I looked over things to do in London and surrounding areas, for several weeks before our trip. Being told to plan things on the spur of the moment was kind of a bummer. I got on the internet and looked through my tour guide for things to do. I threw out a ton of ideas on how to spend our time in Southern France - lavender fields in Provance, day on the beach near our condo, visiting museums in Nice, driving to visit the village of Eze, go to a Monte Carlo casino, see the mountains, have lunch at a village cafe and a few other ideas - each idea was rejected. I looked up National Parks of France and found one about 1.5 hours away from Cannes. Finally! Something he agreed to do. So glad we had a plan for day 8.