Travel day to Juan Les Pins - French Riviera
Trip Start
May 18, 2007
1
32
62
Trip End
Jul 18, 2007
Juan Les Pins,
France
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Today we slept in a bit as we were moving from Villefranche to Juan Les Pins and had some extra time to burn and after eating a quick pastry breakfast we headed for the train station.
We really enjoyed our stay at the Hotel Riviera with all the amenities within a few steps of our room. As you recall the train station was a bit of a haul so we called for a taxi. Fortunately we called early as 2 cruise ships had docked early and about to unload 6,000 screaming tourists upon quaint Villefranche, all scrambling for a taxi at the same time! We latched onto our taxi driver for the short drive and he dropped us off in plenty of time to catch the train for 10 stops up the road to Juan Les Pins.
Huge bathroom - Hotel Astor
Sunday's are a bit tricky with the train schedule and Laurie read the departure time wrong so we ended up reading our books for over an hour as all the cruiseline tourists jammed the platform. Thankfully most were headed to Monaco!!
We arrived in Juan Les Pins in a torrential rain storm and waited it out in the tiny train station.
After a short walk across the tracks we found our Hotel Astor www.residencehotelastor.com tucked away on a nice QUIET residential street. We were greeted by Jesse, the owner of this small hotel, and had a nice chat with him before heading back out to check out our new village. We decided almost immediately that this was THE best place we have stayed during the last 4 wks! The room was immaculate, spacious and Jesse went above and beyond making us feel welcome! One more thing: we had been plagued with extremely noisy and busy streets in the last few places so Jesse's Hotel Astor was a welcome relief and we knew we would actually get some good sleep!
We headed straight to the beach as the couple we had met in Villefranche had recommended that we eat lunch ON the beach! We did just that and found a great restaurant right on the sand and had a great meal - inches from the surf
Private deck at the Hotel Astor - sweet!
! It was very cool!We wandered around the small village which was filled with small boutiques but not a lot of people, which we loved!
The weather was not wonderful with the heavy rain shower earlier in the day so we decided it was a good day to take off as we were in desperate need to do a load of laundry. We hunkered down in the laundromatte for a while until Ryan had enough of he "sauna" - it was a steamer in there! We diagrammed out our next few weeks of travel (high level you know) and got the heck out to hang out our "damp" clothes as we we were done with the laundromatte scene!
We headed back over to the beach and had a great meal on the sand, again - that French Riviera is quite a site and it was so peaceful. We noticed that the surf is so quiet and hardly any splash, making for a most enjoyable evening!!
Tomorrow we plan to walk around the cape to Antibes to check out the 1600 yacht slips!
Today's walk: 5.4 miles
Total for the journey (163 miles, 30 days)
Love,
Laurie and Ryan
Comments
Lovely
The area looks just lovely. I'm glad you had a chance to get in a bit of rest and dinner on the beach. I don't think you can beat that! Sammy
Beaches
Eating on the beach sounds loverly!!! Your hotel room looks great...I esp like the bigger bathroom...you can't have too much room in a WC you know!
Glad you're resting up! All that walking is wearing ME out and I'm just reading about it!!
xo,
Gaily