CEBToD: Day 12 -- Nice to Monaco to San Remo

"Oh cool.... we had breakfast in France, lunch in Monaco, and we'll have dinner in Italy." That about sums up today. Between 36 and 45 miles (I think 36, but my odometer mysteriously jumped to 45 somewhere at the end of the day), with 1700 feet of climbing, across 4h10m of actual biking. We started in Nice, and biked along the mountainous coast through Monaco over into Italy. 3 countries in one day by bike... we were pretty pleased with ourselves! =D

The ride to Monaco was ridiculously beautiful. Lots of up and down along these cliffs jutting out over the Med... red-roofed villages clinging to the hills... beautiful sunny skies and a light breeze.... lots of biking work, but worth every meter. Villefranche was our favorite... ridiculously beautiful. Monaco itself is super-cool... more freaking petit trains there, but what can you do. We had lunch at a little restaurant adjacent to the yachts... we saw a camaro with IL license plates parked there. Swear to god. We took a picture but couldn't find the owner to chat him up. :( I'm wondering if he drove it there via his yacht. =P We checked out the casinos after a 12% grade climb (only a couple 100 meters long, but dear god that was hard), then left town.

More beautiful French Med vistas... at one point we had a phenomenal descent with only a slight grade that lasted forever and switchedback down a hill on the Med... then the border with Italy! A big deal... we were leaving behind not just France but any hope of being able to communicate with the locals in their native language, as none of us speak Italian. D'oh. Wish us luck.

Italy was more of the same gorgeous viewage... though right outside Ventimiglia was the most dangerous bit of biking we've done the entire trip (and since I'm writing this part post-biking, I can say it was the most dangerous, period). It was a steep descent through a very long tunnel (900 meters or more?), with no interior lighting, bad shoulder so we had to ride in the car lane, and it came up on us too fast for us to pull over and turn on our lights. So it was dark, we werent' easily visible to cars, and it was a perilous ride just given the road quality itself. Very very scary. But over relatively quickly... and really good for me to get over my fear of descent through dark tunnels brought on by my crash. =P Character building!!!

Anyways... more biking, and we decided to stop in San Remo. Random Italian town, but the choice ended up being awesome. The room we got was HUGE.... 2 bedrooms, giant bathroom, balcony overlooking the water, and breakfast included... all for just ~100 euros. And the town itself is very cool.... lots of narrow pathways between ancient buildings, all cut into the hills of the town... so we explored for a while and had a lot of fun with it.

Dinner took us a while to find... most places we came across seemed way too expensive (15+ euros/plate). We finally settled on a random pseudo-touristy-lookin place called Dick Turpins, down by the water. Yeah... I don't get the name, either. =P Our dinner tonight was basically the exact opposite of our dinner 2 nights ago in St. Tropez. Instead of them rushing us through our meal, we sat there for like 3 hrs total, end to end. It was nuts. But the food... hoder, the food!! It was sooooo good. I had a phenomenal lemon risotto that I'm totally going to try making at home. And I ordered some sangria that was floating in this giant-ass bowl at the bar... and oh dear god. It was the best sangria I've had in my LIFE. I'm not exaggerating (me? never!!!). It had nutmeg, cinnamon, bananas, oranges, raspberries, apples, pineapples... it was so good I had multiple foodgasms, right there in front of everyone. I'm getting goosebumps just thinking of it. I should have collected samples to analyze back in the lab so I could duplicate it. Dear god.

And then after dinner we wandered back to a gelato place... and OMG best gelato EVER. I don't know why all the food here was so good, but it was amazingly awesome. I had cafe and coco and something else... and it just danced on my tongue. Dan cited this gelato as what the rest of the trip will likely be like for us. =D

After gelato, Dan pussed out and went to bed. But Ben and I stayed up and drank up on the rooftop deck of our hotel, roughly 6 stories up, with an awesome vista of the town and the Med. Fantastic way to close out the night!!