Saturday 17th September

Once again it's moving day once again and our last day with the car as we were to return it to the airport at Nice. The trip from San Remo to Nice didn't even take one hour but getting to our hotel was another story. We didn't have a map of Nice only the internet map of the hotel and streets surrounding it. We had to ask three times as to where we were and it's good to be back in France and just be able to get by with the language. Anyway we finally came to our hotel which is on a corner but one of the streets is a pedestrian way and a tram only way. We parked on the footpath!! and put the hazard lights on for the third time today. We unpacked the car for the first time since we picked it up in Dijon. What a lot of sorting we have to do before we get onto a plane.

We got instructions as to how to get to the airport and away we went down one way streets until we reached the Mediterranean and turned right. We nearly missed the turnoff to the airport as the trees had grown over the sign but we made an emergency turn and headed around to the car rental return area. We were ushered into lane 5 in an underground building and headed down to the next available place to park. All of the lanes were full of cars being returned and people getting out and getting their bags out. I have never seen anything like it before as there were hundreds of cars and more people. Very soon after we exited our car a young chap came up and wanted to know if the car was full of petrol and if we had scratched anywhere. All was well so he told us to leave the keys in the car and go and catch the bus back to town. We had done 2650 kms and had not spent any time on the wrong side of the road in the entire journey. We have been lost many times but in the end a lovely car to drive and ride in.

Back into town on the bus and we decided we had plenty of time to kill before we were to report back at the hotel to check-in - Not before 2.00pm we were told. We saw a café advertising live Rugby World Cup games daily so this was where we decided to have lunch. We sat down and the Aussie/Ireland game had just finished and the four young Aussies were almost crying in their beer at the result. We ordered lunch and a beer and chatted with the Aussies who were over here until Christmas and were on an extended tour of Europe. When we had finished lunch we went looking for a bookshop so that Jannie could buy another couple of novels to read. She is currently reading her 14th book whilst I am lagging a bit behind. We keep leaving them behind us when we have both finished reading them and at one apartment we exchanged books we had read with ones we hadn't. Just around the corner from our hotel is a long pedestrian street that has literally dozens of restaurants and cafes so will have no shortage of place to eat whilst we are here.

Issy, Ruby and Lucy can start counting down to the day we get home now as it's only 9 sleeps before we get to try out our own bed again and suddenly with no car and only 4 days in Nice our overseas adventure is coming to an end. We did try to ring Stu and Mike and eventually got Lucy to answer the phone and I don't think it was that late but got cut off before we were finished.