Antibes, on the coast in the South of France, will be our home base for the next four days. Ninety-nine percent of the drive to Antibes from Carcassonne was nice. The last 1% was rough. This is our welcome to Antibes?
After sharing a jambon buerre for lunch at a roadside diner near Arles, we continued east on the A8 toward Antibes. Our route took us right through the heart of Provence.
The Road to Antibes
The landscape thus far had been mostly green rolling hills, but after Arles, things got more interesting. Jagged outcroppings of rocky peaks began to take the place of rolling hills.
The Antibes exit led to a narrow road that snaked down and around steep rocky slopes to the city. Antibes is bigger than I expected. Our hotel is nestled in a dense warren of buildings and one-way streets – not conducive to GPS navigation.
The GPS lady went radio-silent intermittently as we neared the hotel. Twists, turns, and intersections were so close together, no matter how slow we tried to go, she couldn’t keep up with us. Traffic was heavy, and there was no place to park or even pull over.
After being silent, the GPS Lady would blurt out, “please turn left on Rue d’Alger, turn right on Avenue Niquet, then immediately turn right again on Avenue Lemeray.”
Great. But by that time, Rue d’Alger, Avenue Niquet, and Avenue Lemeray were ancient history. We were lucky if we’d even spotted any of those street names.
Double Up on Tech?
OK. Time to try the phone’s GPS plus the car’s GPS Lady. Double-up on tech. Oh yeah. That was gonna work.
They started off in sync. That didn’t last long. Then they were all over the place. It was like being guided by two kids arguing in the back seat.
Back in the day, before GPS, I’d have a map showing in detail the area around the hotel. I would have known it’d be tricky, so I would have done my homework. These days, who bothers with a map?
Just as she did in Carcassonne, the GPS Lady took us in a repetitive loop. We kept passing the same landmarks. The hotel had to be close. VERY close.
Yes, it was close, but we still couldn’t find it. Time to park the car and find the hotel on foot. (Again!)
The No-Parking Parking Lot
Our hotel had been partially visible behind signs saying “No Entry” and “No Parking.” The “No Entry” sign had an image of a tow truck on it. That’s where we should have parked to check in. Dang.
Armed with this new information, I walked back to the parking lot, got the car, came back to the signs, ignored them, and parked in front of the hotel. I parked alongside the five or six other cars already parked in the supposedly no-parking zone.
A very nice young girl checked us in. Our room was on the fourth floor. There was no elevator. There was no way my petite Better Half could haul our bags up three flights of stairs. No problem. She stayed with the luggage while I left to go park the car. (In the same lot we had parked in the first time).
When I returned, my petite Better Half was there, but our luggage was gone. Uh-oh.
But guess what? The nice young girl had insisted on lugging all three bags up to our room by herself. Wow. I was stunned. I commented that the big one is really heavy. She replied in her sweet French accent, “I know!”
Then she brought us refreshments in the very comfortable hotel lounge. We’d made it!
To be continued…
