Nice-Ventimiglia-Milan Day 10

April 9, 2010

Day 10 Nice-Ventimiglia-Milan

We woke up pretty early to try and get some information from the train station.  We went in and lined up and at the front of the line we found out that there were no trains heading to Switzerland this day or the next.  Don't get me wrong, it would have been very lovely to be able to stay in Nice for 2 days, but our schedule didn't work with that plan, especially since we had Heather's kitty cat to worry about.  We figured if we couldn't get into Switzerland the French way, we would try the Italian way.  We had thought we weren't going to see Italy for a long time, but it turned out, we would see it again very soon.  There was a local train to Ventimiglia that was running at 15:23, one of the only trains running this day.  We headed back to the hotel to figure out what our plan was going to be.  Unfortunately, going to Monaco was out of the question because the best way to get there was train and the first one in that direction was the one we would take back to Italy.  We had to decide how far we would go in Italy this day and where we would spend the night.  After all that planning was done, we went to eat at a café on the street and then headed to the Promenade des Anglais to see what the beaches of the French Riviera look like.  It was a beautiful view at the beach and a really nice day to top it off.  I had no idea that the beaches were not sand here.  They were rock all the way along.  We stayed on the beach for about 2 hours, suntanning and enjoying the sound of the ocean and then headed back to the hotel to pick up our luggage and headed for the train station.  Looking at the boards, it looked like the train we had been told would be running was cancelled, so I went back in line to ask while Trevor went running around trying to figure it out from other sources.  Luckily someone told him everything was good (though he did say that our train was leaving in 2 minutes even though we should have had 20) so he ran and got me and then we ran to the train.  We left on time and headed into Ventimiglia and then booked our Milan tickets and got on to the train for Milan.  This train was like the sleeping train with the 6 seat cabins facing other people.  Near the end of our ride we started talking to the people next to us, who lived in Milan, but were from Chile and USA.  They told us some great info on couch surfing.  We then headed to our hotel through the massive train station of Milan and found it to be an amazingly fancy 4 star hotel.  We finished our night off with a bit of food, some gelati and a movie on the laptop.  At least we were now closer to Switzerland, even if we were behind schedule.