Movements: France

 I don't like flying. It's not the flying part itself that annoys me - looking out over the clouds or the land below is amazing - but the way that airport security, services, prices and overall treatment generally leave you with a sense that you are being abused all the time. So for journeys that don't involve travelling across oceans I prefer to take the train. I am on a five week trip, part business, part social, part domestic, and I'll be taking the train much of the time. The train lets you see more and is less cramped.

I'll be seeing a lot of friends and family but my companion is Coco Peru and Little Miss Alien that I wrote about a few weeks ago. 

I set off at the end of April, piling my boy case and my girl case into a taxi to my nearest station at Sanremo, an extraordinary modern structure with platforms buried deep inside a mountain with a long tunnel with four travelators that takes you from the station entrance to the trains. 

 

They say to allow ten minutes to get to the platforms from the taxi rank outside and they're not wrong. You can run it in five if you're fit!

I can get from home in Italy to Britain by train in a day but I prefer to take it gently and so I spent my first night away in Nice. The train journey along the coast from Italy to Nice is one of the most beautiful in the world, trundling along the corniche that overlooks rocky coves and passing through attractive seaside villages like Menton and Beaulieu-sur-Mer, and even the tiny country of Monaco. 

Nice itself is famously attractive with its palms, azure bay and beautiful buildings. It's overpriced, though. But I had chosen my hotel well as it was set back from the street at the end of a leafy drive. I hadn't realised when I booked that the Hotel Oasis had once been occupied by Russian writer Anton Chekhov, for whose plays and short stories I have the great admiration, and is said to be where he wrote one of his most performed works, Three Sisters. 

Weird modern sculpture to Chekhov in the hotel garden

The morning train to Paris from Nice takes over five and a half hours so I try to get a comfortable seat by the window on the side overlooking the sea as the coast around Antibes, Cannes and Juan-les-Pins is dramatic, with pinnacles of red rock overtopping small coves and jagged headlands. 

Taking photos through the train windows is not easy, though. This is the only half decent photo I got. 

In Paris you change stations to get the Eurostar train to London from the Gare du Nord. It's a very comfortable fast service through the Channel Tunnel. I had to disappoint my newsagent who wondered if you could see fish out of the train windows. Sadly not. Maybe fish gazing could be a feature of any second tunnel?

It's always a letdown to get off the smart Eurostar and go down into the dirty, smelly London Underground. Thankfully, that journey is short. And so I arrived in London for the first part of this trip.

Sue x