You all know me, I’m an insomniac. I usually get 4, maybe 5 hours of sleep and I’m pretty much OK. Funny how you think that living that way would make jetlag less effective. Ha. It’s what, 9:30 or so as I type this. That’s typically about 4-5 hours before I go to bed or at least to sleep. Right now, however, I’m ready to drop. Guess that’s possibly because it’s about 6am in Italy, or maybe it’s just that trips to the Mediterranean cure insomnia. OK that’s stretching it a bit…

Anyway, the photo album is up and running – at least partially. If you click on the link to the right called “Photo Gallery” you can see a listing of various photo albums that we have published. One of them is now “Europe 2005”. There are many pictures there, and I have so far only uploaded them to the server. Captions have not yet been added, but I’ll be doing that over the next week or so (there are about 1300 pictures, so it takes a while). For those of you that want to see the pictures “in the flesh” or with some kind of dialog, restrain yourselves from clicking and hopefully we’ll see some of you on the weekend with a – gasp – slide show.

A shortcut link is here: http://peterandersen.homeade.com/pix/thumbnails.php?album=14.

We’re back. After a long day of flying (2 flights, one from Rome to London, the other from London to Vancouver) we are home safe and sound and ready for sleep. Everything went smoothly on disembarkation, other than the fact that the Rome to London flight was delayed by about an hour. We had a 2 hour buffer at Heathrow, but getting from one terminal to another can take upwards of 45 minutes – before customs! So it was a pretty close call catching our Vancouver flight, but we got it.

Mare slept through most of the flight, guess she needed it. Me, who usually sleeps, didn’t at all. Saw 3 movies and twiddled my thumbs for the most part (oh, the 3 were Unleashed, Unbreakable and Warm Springs (an FDR bio-pic – yes I was that desperate). I’m going on about 24 hours straight now so I’m planning on some zzzz’s very soon.

Mare’s brother Jim was kind enough to pick us up – thanks! – so here we are. I’ll get the photos organized over the next few days and will have an online album up at http://peterandersen.com/pix very soon.

Hi all. Well, here we are at the last port of call – Genoa. More on that in a minute, but first let’s talk about Villefranche, Nice, Monaco and Monte Carlo.

We arrived in Villefranche early yesterday with no fixed itinerary, but we had a pretty good idea what we wanted to do. We walked around this small fishing village for about an hour (some of it not on purpose ;) ) then hopped on a bus to Nice. Nice was, well, just “nice”. The boardwalk was great to see:

http://peterandersen.homeade.com/Nice_boardwalk.jpg

Yes, that’s the French Riviera to the left and Nice to the right. Behind Mare, quite a ways, would be Cannes (further than you can see tho). In front of her (behind me), Monaco, Monte Carlo and eventually Genoa. Overall, Nice was not all that spectacular. Once you got away from the boardwalk things got grungy pretty fast. So we only spent an hour or two there then hopped on another bus to head to Monaco.

Monaco, on the other hand, was wow. Spectacular, probably our most favourite place next to Oia. We spent quite a bit of time on the top of the hill that is most of Monaco, including the palace, the cathedral, the Institute de Oceanographique (ok maybe that’s how it was spelled, it looks French). Much to see, and all of it was photogenic. We made our way down the hill and to the harbour, which was hosting a Yacht Show. No, we didn’t buy anything…

Once we walked around the entire harbour and headed up the hill, we arrived in Monte Carlo and at the famous Casino. Pretty crowded, so I had to stand behind a crappy car to take my picture:

http://peterandersen.homeade.com/Monte_Carlo_Ferrari.jpg

It was one of the cheaper Ferraris parked there – peasants.

We went into the Casino (duh) and actually had to pay 10 Euro each for the privilege. Unfortunately it was fairly early in the day, so the Blackjack, Punto and major rooms were not open yet. So we didn’t get to play Blackjack there, but we did spend some time in the Slots area. Mare won about 150 Euro playing some .50 Euro slots (that’s almost equivalent to dollar slots here – way over her norm ;)). This was good news, so we celebrated by having lunch at the Cafe Paris. It was right outside the Casino, another outdoor cafe of course, and ironically enough we had italian. Guess old habits (well, 12 day old habits) die hard.

We went back into the Casino for one more trip (the 10 Euro was a day pass and we wanted to use as much of it as we could). Went back to the slots and this time I won and ended the visit up about 50 Euro. So overall we kicked Monte Carlo’s butt ;).

Took a train back to Villefranche instead of the bus. Finding the train station was actually pretty difficult – who would have thought a train station was hard to find, but trust France to hide it. The train only took about 15 minutes to arrive in Villefranche, or about 3x as fast as the bus.

Walking back, we found a small beach just east of the harbour and Mare dipped her feet in the French Riviera. Another thing of the “list”. And we found that not all of the natives were unfriendly:

http://peterandersen.homeade.com/kids_beach_villefranche.jpg

Ended the day with a casual dinner – believe it or not we couldn’t handle another 5 course meal – and then pretty much relaxed until about midnight when we crashed for the night.

Today – Sunday – we arrived in Genoa. Genoa is apparently a well known shopping town and we were actually kind of looking forward to playing the shopping tourist role. Funny about Sundays in Italy though – Genoa was closed. Closed. I’m not really exaggerating here – about the only things open were cafes. Even ATMs were shut down. So we spent a whopping 25 minutes in Genoa before coming back on the shuttle to report the action packed day to you ;). So you know all those lavish gifts we were going to buy ? Damned if we couldn’t – sorry about that hehe…

Anyhow, signing off. Made my last blog a whopper, I know. We won’t be posting again until we get back, except maybe a quick “hi” from Heathrow if time permits. Looking forward to getting back and seeing all of you very soon!

PS Jimmy, you were asking about our arrival plans (no we’re not expecting anyone else so don’t bother :) ). We arrive on British Airways flight #85 (BA085) Monday at 6:35pm. Please check with your mum to see if she is already coming to get us. Thanks and see one of you at the airport !