Lots and lots of stops!

The last two days have been frantic - we have been to so many different places and stopped so many different times. Our trek for the two days took us from our beachfront apartment in Toulon to an inland city called Lucca.

You can see photos from the two days as part of this Flickr set for photos on the road:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/81692166@N05/sets/72157645709737341/

Our overnight destination was the town of Loano, about 6 hours' driving time along the coast from Toulon. This in theory took us through or near Nice, Monaco and Genova. I wasn't particularly concerned about Genova, and to a lesser extent Nice, but it would have been good to drop by Monaco.

Our first hour or two of driving was mostly inland, before we got back to the coast near Nice. After driving along a highway above the centre of Nice, and driving through the drop-off area for Nice Airport (thanks a lot TomTom GPS), we went back up to the road directly above Nice. From there, you can really start to see the clay-coloured roofs that make the Azure Coast region of France and Italy so famous:

Above the roofs of Nice

Next up was Monaco. Although getting to it turned out to be a real nightmare, we eventually made it. We even saw a red Ferarri on the way. Not that it was the only one we saw - I counted four by the time we left Monaco proper. I don't know how the locals do it - there's traffic EVERYWHERE. Even the red Ferarris don't get a free pass. Even in Monte Carlo the traffic was awful:

 Dropping by in Monaco

After Monaco we pretty much kept going in a straight line along the coast until we hit Loano. Unfortunately it was a very slow line - the traffic through the centre of the small towns like Ventimiglia and Sanremo, in particular, was awful - even worse than in Monaco. These were not voluntary stops - definitely more mandatory.

Our small overnight place in Loano meant we had to walk a fair way to get to the restaurant area of town - and once we got there there was limited choice. We settled on a place that literally translates as '16', which is the street number. I had a pasta, and dad had a pizza. How Italian. I also managed to find a gelati place on the way back to the hotel.

The next morning (after catching up thanks to my first unlimited internet since leaving Andorra), we had an enormous hotel-provided buffet breakfast of pastries and cereals before getting back in the car. We drove up over the top of a lot of coastal port towns on our second day - including Genova, which was a pretty awful gas-guzzlers' haven, but also including places like Portofino, which is a picturesque town a little further south:

  My favourite photos from our second day on the road

It took us a little while to contact the Airbnb host in Lucca, and to find where we were staying, but eventually we made it at about 9:30 at night. After getting all the documents sorted, we rested before a couple of days here, where we would plan on exploring Lucca and Pisa for one day each.