Nice is Nice?

I wouldn’t really know if Nice is nice… we didn’t see much of it besides the airport and the roads leading west out of the city toward St. Remy. The airport was okay, I guess… fairly small and nothing really fabulous or terrible to speak of.

Our flight out here was interesting. Our friend, Alison, dropped us at the airport around 5:00 – about three hours before our flight was supposed to leave. Upon check-in we realized that the flight was delayed 30 minutes, rescheduled to leave at 8:35. We stopped in for dinner at Houlihan’s, made our way through security, found our gate, and chose two seats by an electrical outlet, where we plugged in the laptop and settled in for an episode of Lost. After a couple more delays and a couple more episodes of Lost, we finally boarded the plane around 9:30, sat on the tarmac a bit, and took off around 9:45 p.m. In the meantime we got a call from Kate… she and Tim were also stuck on the tarmac in DC due to weather, which caused them to miss their connection in Zurich. So we left Atlanta not knowing when we were all going to be able to meet up.

The flight itself was surprisingly painless, even with my increased fear of flying (I don’t know, it must have something to do with terrorists, overworked pilots, recent crashes…). Jarrett and I listened to part of his “Direct to Nice” playlist on the iPod; watched most of Sideways on the laptop (until the batteries gave out), complete with a few gin and tonics (for Jarrett) and some shiraz (for me); and I was able to fall asleep to his “Sleep” playlist and slept for maybe about four hours. Upon waking, we were served croissants, raisins, orange juice, and a granola bar, and we watched an episode of Digging for the Truth on Stonehenge on the iPod (what would we do without electronics?). By that point we only had about an hour left on the plane.

It turned out that Kate and Tim made it to Nice about an hour after us… just enough time for us to claim our rental car (which is a real powerhouse, by the way… it does 0 to 60 in like three minutes… you’ve got to give it to those French engineers… geniuses, pure geniuses… oh, sorry, but, yeah, Jarrett has really enjoyed cracking on the poor vehicle). After some beating on the GPS system on Tim’s part, we took off for St. Remy, opting for the fastest route, which ended up taking us about two, two-and-a-half hours.

St. Remy – and Mas de la Chouette (the gite we are calling home this week) specifically – is absolutely picture-perfect. I don’t know if my photographs will do it justice, but I will try. After meeting the owners (this is Kate and Tim’s second visit to this particular house), we made a trip to the local grocer and picked up some items for breakfasts this week, as well as dinner tonight. My French is basically nonexistent, so it was quite fun trying to read food labels… the cereal boxes were especially entertaining for some reason. Tim prepared a chicken and cooked it rotisserie-style in our gite’s oven (pretty cool, I’d have to say… more American ovens need the rotisserie feature), along with roasted fingerling potatoes and carrots. Kate made a salad, and we had a freshly baked baguette with cheese as well… and, of course, wine. I think we all completely forgot about our jobs and the hectic travel after the first glass. Vacation, we are here.