A Day of Wonder - Nice, France

When your daylight hours begin at midnight because the sun is already up in the sky and you’ve flown across so many time zones so that it now registers as 7 a.m., you know you’re in Europe! And it’s how you begin a long marvel-filled day.

We landed in Dusseldorf, Germany to spend several hours in the quiet, immaculately clean, precisely ordered airport where everything was in, well, German - and oh, how we’d practiced our French! Yet soon we found ourselves on an AirBerlin flight gazing down in awe over the massive, rocky Alpes Martimes to quickly find ourselves landing practically right onto the sparking, fabled, exciting Mediterranean Sea in Nice, France!

It’s warm! It’s sunny! It’s 75 degrees! Shedding our travel jackets and changing into sandals, we moved from plan A to B and even C when we learned of the bus strike, but we eventually got to our hotel, exclaiming in wonder at the sparking Mediterranean out our taxi windows.

Exploring the city on foot was a marvel - the Sea is right here with its fabled rocky beach, sun-loving clothing-optional fans, four-mile long Promenade des Anglais, quaintly beautiful buildings. And into the old city Vieux Nice, the narrow winding stone-paved streets bringing charm and exclamation around every turn. We stopped for socca (chickpea crepe) and un verre du vin rouge, found a torte au blette pastry to save for breakfast, and thoroughly enjoyed two scoops of gelato in a place we’ll never be able to find again! Not a bad dinner for our first night in France.

Oh, what a joy to enjoy the day the full day through!