Three countries, two days, one beach

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Day eight. Up with Ricky the rooster for the last time, we packed up, said our goodbyes to friends, the house and the mountains and headed on the loooooong drive to just outside of Monaco. It. Was. Hot.......It. Was. Long....... A couple of accidents (not ours) and a couple of stops later and, after seven hours, we reached the supermarket near to our hotel for the night. Unfortunately although the Lidl was the Lidl to beat all others, they didn't have baskets. (Turns out you fill your bag for life instead but I didn't know that) and I didn't have a trolley so in hot sweaty desperation I saw a kids trolley which I then had to drag around the shop looking a bit special (Seth was in the car with Ash). Then I had to find milk, which bizarrely they didn't have (only the uht kind) so I had to make a good ten tours of the whole shop looking like an escaped madwoman dragging this now heavy and full kids trolley eventually leaving with my pride all but gone (again). The hotel was great if somewhat off the beaten track. Fortunately it had Aircon and a pool. Seth and Ash had a swim, we ate tea, first outside with three murder wasps then inside when one decided it wanted to live in my hair ....

Day nine. Today should have been an hour to Monaco, a few hours there then at our hotel for tea. It was not this but in many ways was probably better. We set off pretty early and headed to Monaco. On the way we saw two fire helicopters putting out forest fires which, whilst not great for them, was amazing to see. Sadly we also saw traffic. Lots of it. Eventually we got into Monaco (the views making up for the journey there) and found that, although there were many car parks, we couldn't park in any of them. We did make a round trip into and out of one which was high enough but Ash was convinced we couldn't park there ?. After a fruitless fifty minutes or so (admittedly with amazing scenery) we decided to head to the beach a bit up the coast in Ventimiglia. It was still hot but the traffic cleared, we parked, ate pizza and soon enough we were on the beach. There was limited (no) shade so I covered up with an arrangement of towels and scarves (pretty sure someone stopped, giggled and took a picture as I must have looked totally ridiculous) to avoid boiling alive, the boys swam and we all looked at the beautiful people of Italy! After drying off we headed for ice cream which, true to form, was a melty mess down me within seconds (fairly sure the same happened at the same ice cream place when we came seven years ago!) Then it was time to find our Agritourismo, a working farm that rents out rooms. With hindsight I should probably have looked in more detail at the location. It was only half an hour away from Ventimiglia (win) unfortunately a good twenty of those minutes were on single track, winding and narrowing roads. The views and place, room and people all fantastic, the location, utterly terrifying. Kind of scared for tomorrow's journey back down but looking forward to the fresh farm breakfast we've been promised before the loooong journey to Venice.

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