Okay, maybe just one more day in France…

It’s starting to feel more like a vacation now! We are taking our time here and enjoying life as tourists.

Whenever we stop somewhere for more than one night, we can’t help ourselves in the grocery stores. We end up buying way more than we need because our appetites are so big, and everything in the shops and markets looks so good, especially in France! We often end up carrying odd things on our bikes, like 500g of dried figs that I bought in Montpellier, France, or a bag of peanuts I’ve been carrying all the way from Portugal, or Camembert cheese we didn’t finish the night before (my bag smells kind of funky at the moment). The food never goes to waste; we usually eat it all, carry it on the bikes the next day, or donate it to the supplies in the AirBNB we’ve stayed at.

Antibes has been no exception; we’re making a salad tonight so will leave some honey mustard dressing with our AirBNB host, plus we’ve got enough French cheese to weigh us down well into Italy, too many croissants, eggs we’ll eat for breakfast, brownies we found at a farmer’s market this morning, and some savory puffed pastry delicacies we found at the local boulangerie that we ate for dinner. Oh la la! Still, even with all this copious eating, our belts are getting loose; we are feeling fit and trim! Loving this lifestyle.

Speaking of food, we took advantage of our kitchen in the AirBNB this morning to make some of my egg and cheese sandwiches, but with a French twist: fried eggs and Port Salut cheese on croissants.

Here’s the salad we made for dinner: fresh greens with cherry tomatoes, figs, oranges, chèvre, whole grain mustard, and honey.

After breakfast we went for a walk around town. I found a shop that sold all sorts of sewing supplies, and they had country flag patches, so I picked up all the ones I’m missing. Now to sew these onto my bag somewhere. I decided that patches would work better than the stickers, which are falling off already.

We stumbled on a farmer’s market with lots of amazing looking fresh produce and everything else. We couldn’t resist picking up two decadent brownies and stopping for a drink and people watching.

The rain that was forecast came on strong, starting with strong winds and hail and then continuing on and off all day with bouts of thunder and minor flooding in the streets. For lunch, we had a flower-themed restaurant recommendation from our AirBNB host, so we checked it out, and it was amazing (all the flowers served are edible).

Avoiding the rain, we visited the Picasso museum, which highlights a selection of his works made while he lived here in Antibes, one of the happier periods of his life. Afterwards, we went to the post card museum, which is really interested and underrated in my opinion. You must visit if you are in Antibes. The collection of thousands of post cards from the owner’s personal collection includes historic cards from the late 1800s and early 1900s, funny ones, really fancy ones, ones with gimmicks like built-in record players, and everything in between. We were the only visitors, so he happily gave us an amazing personal tour of the collection.

While preparing dinner, we were planning tomorrow’s ride when we realized a sad mistake we’d made. The Monaco tourist office (where we will get our passport stamped) is only open 11am-1pm on Sunday. That wouldn’t give us enough time to see Nice. We had planned to see Nice, Eze, Monaco, get our passport stamped, cross into Italy, and camp tomorrow. There’s no camping or affordable lodging near Monaco, and we don’t want to rush to Monaco or to backtrack that far, so we made the decision to have a very short 20km day tomorrow and stay in Nice, where we will have more time to explore before heading to Italy on Monday.