I am really enjoying your report, Underhill! It is bringing back lovely memories of the area. Please keep posting!

Well, I left out an important bit. On Saturday, when we were driving to Grasse, we stoped at a BNP ATM in the small town of Mouans-Sartoux. And guess what? The machine ate my card!!! But the very professional woman in the office whipped out a key, opened up the machine, and retrieved the card. Then she stood over me while I inserted it in one of the inside ATMs to be sure I was doing it right--clearly I must have been an idiot to lose my card!--and everything worked fine.

letour, the piscine should show on the web site--if it's still up. Evidently the new owners don't plane to continue the B&B operation (sob! sob!).

grandmere,

I don't think we'd base in the Grasse area again. If we return to the Nice area we'd stay in Nice and take the train/bus around rather than driving. There's just too much heavy traffic these days; our host told us that there's been something like a 40% population increase throughout Provence, and I can well believe it.

But...there's quite a lot to see and do in the area. If you haven't been there, I'd suggest staying near St-Paul-de-Vence in the charming Le Hameau small hotel; driving around there isn't bad, as you can head up to Vence and Tourrettes-sur-Loup and do a fair amount of sightseeing without hitting the dreaded coastal roads.

Valbonne is a pleasant small town near Grasse, but as it's on the eastern side of the hills around Grasse you can avoid the crowded roads to the west.

The Saga of the Mariage Frères Tea Shipment

My husband just loves Mariage Frères’ French Breakfast tea, which smells like chocolate but tastes like tea, but it’s too expensive to have it shipped from Paris. Friends kindly bring us a tin every now and then, but I wanted MORE. The plan was to load up on the tea when we were in Paris, but then we decided that my problem knee wouldn’t enjoy the walking that being in the City of Light entails. So, I had a brilliant idea: order the tea for shipment to our friends’ address in France.

I placed the order in July, and the charge appeared on my c/c statement soon after. At the beginning of September, when our friends returned from vacation, I asked whether the tea had arrived. No.

Then I sent several e-mail messages to Mariage Frères: no responses. Finally I sent another with our friends’ internet address. Nothing.

When we arrived in Provence the shipment had not. We called the company, and someone promised to look into the problem and get back in touch with us. Not!

Finally the nice people at our B&B found someone at MF who was willing to look into the problem. What happened was that the shipping department had omitted our friends’ name from the package, and the postman took it back to the post office. There it sat until it was finally returned to Paris. No one bothered to get in touch with us for further instructions, and no refund was issued.

Our kind host spoke with a supervisor at MF and persuaded him to send the package again as a two-day delivery. That was on Tuesday; the package was expected by Friday.

Came Friday, and no package. Evidently the postman came while our hosts were out in the garden and didn’t ring the bell. The package went back to the post office.

On Saturday we were scheduled to leave for Nice. Our friends agreed to pick up the parcel—if it ever arrived—and deliver it to us, but as we were packing up the car the postman arrived with the tea. I was very glad to see that it was the right variety, given all the other errors!

Moral of the story: be careful when ordering tea from Mariage Frères, and when you send anything to a French address be sure that the recipient’s name is clearly indicated on it. Evidently the lack of a name matching that on a mailbox means no delivery.

Sunday breakfast began with warm apple galettes for each of us. Afterwards we consulted our hosts about where to have the traditional Sunday lunch and took off for the perched village of Cabris, where we ate at the Auberge du Vieux Château. Getting up to the restaurant required something of a climb, but at least there were no steps, and afterwards Bob figured out how to collect me next to the restaurant. We had a reasonably good lunch but decided that it was not a good value for the price—on Sundays only one prix-fixe meal is available, so there was no possibility of a single course. Fine views, however.

After lunch we returned to the B&B to relax and finally get our things organized. Bob opened up his laptop, and he and our host spent a happy hour figuring out how to access the WiFi in the bastide, and once it was working Bob was on line checking his business e-mails.

Around 7:00 p.m. we drove over to our friends’ home for a dinner with a couple from Mont-Ventoux and Paris whom we had met in California. Sophie pulled out all the stops! We began with a sort of quenelle of shrimp, lobster, and salmon in a lobster sauce, followed by roast leg of Sisteron lamb with assorted veggies cooked with cumin. We were offered six cheeses, followed by a a luscious fig tart. We rolled down the two sets of stairs to the door and were back at the B&B shortly after 10:00.

The next morning, Monday, we drove to Nice to collect Bob’s credit card. As there was no parking in the underground Palais de Justice lot we decided to be French and park on the sidewalk. Bob remained with the car (the police department was just down the block) and I took his passport and went inside. The person at the desk said proudly that the card was now available and consulted a large folder. As he flipped through it I saw at least a dozen other sequestered cards—ours was in good company. I took Bob’s and returned to the car, happily still in place.

We pulled out our map of Nice and proceeded to the Marc Chagall museum. Finally finding a parking place we walked around the block to find the museum, arriving just in time to meet two tour-buses full of Italian students. Bob raced past to get our tickets, and we spent a pleasant hour looking at the magnificent paintings. Things became less pleasant when I discovered that the restrooms were down a longish flight of stairs: impossible for me.

While hunting for the road leading to the Russian Orthodox Cathedral we happened upon a large Carrefour in the business center, where restrooms were downstairs but accessible by elevator. Very good to keep in mind.
After a mediocre lunch at a brasserie in the mall, we returned to the task of finding the cathedral. We finally pulled up in front and thought we were in Russia, so splendid is the building, with the profusion of decorated domes. The interior was equally beautiful but seemed small until we remembered that churchgoers stand instead of sitting during services. The icons in the cathedral are amazing.

That evening we again had dinner again with our friends, this time a crêpe party. We sat around the big kitchen table; in the center was an electric griddle with six sections for small crêpes. Very cool. We each made individual crêpes and filled them with tapenade, boursin cheese, grated Swiss cheese ,and blue cheese. Dessert crêpes were adorned with preserves, sugar and lemon juice (voted the favorite), and Nutella The crêpe-maker made it all too easy to eat and eat I’d love to find one here, but so far no luck. In France they sold for about 45€.

The rest of the trip report is under
Provence Trip Report, Part Deux.

Underhill,
Thanks for writing! I now need a vacation!

thanks for the wonderful report.
"St-Paul-de-Vence in the charming Le Hameau small hotel". Is this hotel within walking distance of town?
I have always loved that area the best of all of France.