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Monaco, Gracefully

Monaco, 2006
Monaco, Gracefully. Blurry night vision with a cheap camera back in 2006

Let’s see, Monaco… I went there five times during the summer I lived in Nice because everyone who came to visit me always wanted to go there! You can get there from Nice by train, bus or car very quickly… The local bus tickets were only a couple of euros, but on the way back we once got stuck in traffic. The train was faster. And the scenery was great, driving from Nice to Monaco. I lost track of the amount of Ferraris that passed us on that narrow, winding mountain road when we rented a car.

Monaco is a tiny area. I knew a travel guide back then who gave me all sorts of interesting facts about things like how much money you need to have on your bank account to become a resident, but I’ve forgotten all the details. There was a pretty garden with a view, a Mövenpick ice cream stand, and defibrillators everywhere on the streets – and nobody stole or vandalized them! There was the famous F1 Grand Prix tunnel and skid marks on the road. The atmosphere was posh, but gracefully so. Poshness just belonged there.

38 replies on “Monaco, Gracefully”

Hmm, why not? In my opinion, Cannes and those areas were much more of a show-off, Monaco was quite low profile and subtle. Though my experience was limited by my budget, I must admit!! 😉 I can only imagine what those fancy hotels there would’ve been like!

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Yes, it doesn’t seem like a place a zero-waste girl would want to go, I can see that 🙂 I do recommend the areas nearby, though maybe you’ve already been: Beaulieu-sur-Mer and Villefranche-sur-Mer in France and even San Remo in Italy is nice for a short day trip.

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Ahahaha most places on the planet are not zero waste, I hope to travel to them anyway. I hope Monaco won’t disappoint in the way that I only think of it as very fake and only for the richest, like Cannes or St-Tropez.
Villefranche, Beaulieu and San Remo find more easily their place in my peaceful places registry 😉😊

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Hehe, best use of Grace-fully. I drove from Nice to Monaco too. We left our car somewhere and spent a few hours looking at yachts, not going into the Grace Kelly mausoleum (or what is it) since we weren’t proper (shorts), not going into the casino since we were not all 21 yet even though we packed high heels for this purpose. But no knife or torch. We were three girls, did you guess? Fun times.

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Hahah. Come to think of it, I didn’t go to those places, either. The Casino sounded fun, though, but I wasn’t dressed right, either. Though let me add, France had plenty of fancy dress codes too, not just Monaco. Mostly we just walked around, chatting and hanging out, inspecting places… One of the times we had dinner in a nice terrace restaurant overlooking the harbour, and it wasn’t expensive at all (says the Finn).

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I don’t remember eating or drinking anything. Just as well too since a penalty awaited us at the car parked without a ticket… Not that we paid the penalty either. We are Balkans people after all. 😀 I should tell you one time how we got the car back in Vienna without paying the tow-away costs…

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I’ve had two holidays in Nice, the second one should have been for one week but was extended to two as we were grounded due to the volcanic ash that Easter so we visited Monaco several times, mostly by bus as it was so cheap. Not the worst place in the world to get ‘stranded’!

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I agree! Lots of people were stranded in far worse places, hahah! 🙂 That was in 2010, right? I remember because I was doing cabin crew training then (for the 3rd time) and we were unsure if we’d get to do our practice flights or not because of the ash.

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Thanks, Robyn! Grace Kelly was what I first thought of and I couldn’t shake the thought. She definitely was graceful in those old movies – I love movies from that era, Hitchcock and others. There was some sort of exhibition in Monaco when I went there, with her face on posters all over, but I can’t remember what it was and I didn’t go…

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Monaco looks a very beautiful place, but to stay there for any length of time I’d probably need to win the lottery. A week or two would suit me well enough. I always think of Grace Kelly when anyone mentions Monaco. That all seems so long ago now.

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Thanks, Millie! Grace Kelly felt very present there, somehow 😊 In my mind at least! I think most people visit Monaco from France. Back in 2006, the cheapest hotel rooms in Monaco were in a price range of thousands of euros rather than hundreds.

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