Nice is a very international city with great transportation possibilities. All of their buses are 1€. The people we met from Ireland spend their holiday traveling Europe from their base in Nice. The cliffs and the Mediterranian come together nicely for spectacular scenery. We had sometime to run along the coast and climb some stone steps to what was left of a castle, beautiful views still surrounded by lots of green foliage.
Although we did not mention it, I had lost my camera on a train to Nice. So in the morning, we packed up, checked out of the hostel, and found FNAC, the French version of Virgen, they told us. We checked out many different cameras, and eventually I decided on a Samsung, double screen, digital camera. We spent the rest of our little time in Nice waiting for our train to Genova, Italy at the beach. At 4:00, we boarded our train. It was not a fast train by any means and given the beauty out the window, that was just fine. We were delayed on the train and arrived in Genova around 7, which still gave us 4+hours until our night train.
We were lucky to find a fancy hotel right outside the terminal that let us hang out and use their internet. We were there for 3 hours and were able to skype Kylee and Kirk, it makes being away so much easier. Our night train was on time, but the scheduled 6 hours was not enough to feel fresh come morning. We woke up in Rome. Not speaking the language is a bummer, however knowing Spanish helps a little more with Italian then it did with French. We will NEVER again go on a trip without somewhat preparing for the language. We are typical Americans thinking everyone will speak our language, and our travel book does not have any words, phrases, or anything. Again, we met another amazing person that helped us find our way, she was a professor in Montreal for part of the year and taught classes in Rome for part of the year. She has done this for over 20 years. She encouraged me to learn Italian, she stressed that it would not be in CO, it needed to be where they speak Italian.
We took yet another train to port Civitavecchia where we boarded our cruise. We thought we were early but when you are fitting 1500 people on a boat, I guess you get going as soon as possible.....