Mark waded out into the water to take this shot of our beach and the hotel. Definitely a slice of heaven!

What a trip this has been! From the cities in the very north of France, through Normandy along the English Channel and two weeks in Brittany, down The Atlantic coast to the beach at Biarritz, up into the center of the country and then the Alps. Finally now we’re down on the Mediterranean, the French Riviera. The vacation of a lifetime, except I’ve probably had a few of those in this lifetime.

I first encountered the Mediterranean nearly 50 years ago when I sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar in 1974. I loved it then and I love it now. There is just nothing like the color of the sea on a bright sunny day and then you add to it the great cultures and cuisines and landscapes you find everywhere. It’s pretty heavenly and kind of begs the question: why doesn’t everyone live on the Mediterranean?

The walk from our hotel into town. Not a bad view at all.

From our lovely boutique hotel in St Paul de Vence it was only maybe a 20 minute drive to the Nice airport where we dropped off the car before catching a train up the coast to Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. (The French, if you hadn’t noticed, are apparently seriously fond of dashes….) Once we got here it was mostly just beach time.

One highlight was the walkway from our hotel into town. It was maybe a 20-minute walk but on a pedestrian path right along the coast. Mostly shaded, walking past a couple pretty impressive mansions, but always with the stunning view of the Mediterranean and the many yachts that congregate near a port. The other highlight was that our hotel had a small private beach with loungers and umbrellas that made for some very relaxing afternoons.

The private beach and the sea

The only downside to the stop was that we really struggled to find good food, about the only activity that could compete with the beach. There was some good food at our hotel but one, it was at best hit or miss, and two, it’s kind of boring to just eat at your hotel. We went to one little family-owned restaurant that’s been open for nearly 40 years, a place called Captaine Cook, and while the food was OK it was in a spot with no breeze or air moving and at 85 degrees that was just too hot. Another place practically rushed us through, though again the ambience was nothing to keep us lingering anyway. On our last night we finally found a good restaurant right on the port, but otherwise the pickings were slim. On the up side though our hotel made genuinely good martinis so that was always worth looking forward to.

Pretty much every restaurant we went to during this trip had burrata and tomatoes on the menu. This, on our first lunch in Cap Ferrat, may have been the best of the lot – and the best dish we would have for a couple of days!

Mark at the cute but HOT Captaine Cook with a pretty good fish bisque

Having a little pre-dinner drink in the town plaza. If you look at the open windows right above my head you can see – and Mark certainly noticed – a white kitty lying on the window sill.

When he zoomed in to take this picture I assured him it just too far away and would look like hell. Sometimes I’m just dead wrong.

While the food here wasn’t great, we did have some amazing oysters, a type from La Rochelle that our friend Shideh had recommended. They were every bit as good as she’d suggested.

Mark on our walk into town

The port. Apparently people like boats here.

My eternal vision of the Mediterranean

St-Paul de Vence, clustered tightly on its hilltop

The elegant, narrow streets of the town

Me in those streets

From Moustiers we drove a couple very stressful hours southward — almost to the Mediterranean — to reach the postcard-perfect hilltop town of St-Paul de Vence. This was once a normal medieval village perched on a hill with beautiful views to the sea. But then it was discovered by Pablo Picasso, and endless streams of artists and celebrities have passed through since.

About that drive: For the first half or so we were on mountain roads so ridiculously narrow that it seemed two cars could not possibly get past each other. Yet cars kept coming from the other direction, instilling dread as we would slow down to try to squeeze past them without scraping the car on our left or slipping off the shoulder-less cliff on our right.

But once we got out of the mountains we started to sense the magic of the Mediterranean below. We connected onto the highway that runs along the Côte d’Azur, watching the iconic place names go by: St. Tropez, Grasse, Nice, Cannes. But before settling on the coast itself we turned inland from Nice a few miles for this stop at St-Paul de Vence.

Here we spent three wonderful nights at Toile Blanche, a beautiful boutique hotel just outside town. This place got everything right — amazing contemporary design, beautiful gardens, good food, wonderful service. This was a close to perfect stop.

I was concerned beforehand that the place was a bit removed from town — nearly a half-hour walk. And I knew we would never want to use the car once we were settled in. And yet my concerns failed to account for the fact that the walk into town was also a seriously steep uphill climb. So after two journeys into town and back we found ourselves pretty content to just stay in the beautiful hotel. In fact, I was genuinely sad to leave this little slice of heaven.

Who needs to go into town when the hotel grounds look like this?

Lunchtime dining at the hotel

…and dinner

A little vineyard on the grounds

A cemetery juts out over the Mediterranean from one end of the town

The painter Marc Chagall rests here with his wife

Dinner one night in the town

Our room had a private pool, for when we got tired of the two beautiful public pools

Lush Mediterranean foliage — that even matched Jim’s outfit

One last look at this amazing town