Grazie, I mean Merci

Last Saturday we hit the road on the way to Cap D'Ail France. Along the way, we drove through Tuscany and the Italian Riviera and hit up some sights in Firenze (Florence) and Pisa. In Firenze we were not so sure what to see, so we had the GPS bring us to the Tourist Information office. We took a quick tour of the "old city" which felt a lot like Rome, so we decided not to stop for long. Instead, we headed out to the Giardino di Boboli where we saw some beautiful Tuscan estates with views of Florence.

After Firenze, we hit up Pisa to see the tower and have a late lunch. We parked the car a block from the tower and ate along the tourist strip. We found a prix fixe that had some Tuscan style Italian cuisine, which differed quite a bit from what we found in Rome. Scott had a yummy wild boar with olives and polenta dish. At this point we were ready to hit the road and get to France. We had another 3.5 hours of driving ahead of us and it was a wild drive. We took some video that is posted on youtube here

Just as we got the hang of the driving in Italy, we hit the border. The French actually drive differently than the Italians. We were just a short distance from the Italian border, but the drivers were much more relaxed. This was a much appreciated change because we were about to scale down a mountain down to the Port of Monaco. We arrived in the dark, so had no real sense of where we were or what we were looking at. We drove through Monaco and took in all the glitz and glam. There was plenty of it to see. There were yachts everywhere, and this one was hanging out in the port that we could see from the balcony of our hotel....and this isn't the biggest we saw. On Sunday we woke up to yet another day of beautiful sunshine and set on to explore the French Riviera.




Distance traveled: 735km
Countries visited: 3
Number of cars seen costing $100k or more: 200