The flight back

If Ja hadn't agreed to drive us down to the airport in Nice we would have had to take the earliest train out of Menton. As it was, the trip into Nice seemed unnecessarily complex.

We drove by the nicest Nice and the nice-Nord on the way.

The departures shown on the board at the airport were also unnecessarily complex. For a long time it told us we were leaving from gate A but there are 39 gates in the A section of the airport. A few minutes before departure it told us we would be leaving from A19.

The plane left the ground late and we had to circle Zurich for 15 minutes before we could land. Though the tickets only gave us a one hour layover, they forced us through two passport checks and landed at a terminal that was across the airport from the one where we would depart. Once through security we joined the jogging herd to find the train to the next terminal.

The train in Zurich ran underground and they played soothing sounds of cows mooing and bells tinkling as we crammed ourselves into the standing-only platform and wrestled with our luggage.

They were already boarding when we got to our gate and they pulled the two people ahead of us out of line for additional screening. The flight from Zurich over the Atlantic was 11 hours and we were both astonished when Amanda's luggage came off the carousel in Monterey.

I'd spoken to French people about the best times to visit their country and at the time I thought they were being strangely specific about the times of year to fly out. I still think they were being too specific but now I understand the zoo that is the French Riviera during the summer holidays.

Italy was also very interesting but there were just too many tourists in Florence and I don't know if I could get used to the broken technology, missing signage, and lazy attitude towards official timetables and signs. I'm all in favor of working less but it would only take a little effort to, for example, have a map of the railways on the train and put up signs telling people which station they were in.

Still we had a great time and we're already considering going back to visit the north of France and Northern Europe next year.

The sun was setting over the Pacific when we touched down in Monterey. After picking up our luggage we walked three miles in the gathering dusk back to the apartment and to see how the cat and the bird fared in our absence.