Monte Carlo or bust!

Well what else would you expect?! Today we arose relatively early and went for breakfast in our hotel. Last night’s dinner was so good that we had very high expectations of breakfast. Clearly Chef Jean-Paul who was so prominent on last night’s dinner doesn’t do breakfast! There was nothing wrong with it per se, but it was hardly a gourmand breakfast. There was croissants, bread, a roll or ham, some brie (not very ripe) or goat’s cheese and milky coffee from one of those dreadful machines that some hotels use. The layout was chaotic and once it got really busy – fortunately after we had arrived – there was just chaos everywhere. A very diligent waitress appeared each time someone had take a piece of cheese and cut another piece (rather than cut a few and wait until they had gone or nearly gone) and she regularly came and restacked the rolls of ham if someone had dared to dislodge them! Last night’s dinner was so good, but the breakfast experience was quite different. That said, the price paid was exceedingly reasonable and the staff were friendly and courteous throughout. Would we stay there again? Probably, just for the dinner!

We departed our hotel and set off for our first charge of the day. About two hours in and we were ready for the charge. The thing we are learning about driving an electric car on a long journey is that you need to stop about every two hours for about 20 minutes to recharge. Really that isn’t a problem. If anything it is making the journey more enjoyable because with regular breaks it doesn’t seem so tedious driving for hours looking at the same road! Our first stop today was at a Fastned charging station. Not as good as Ionity because it doesn’t give you any indication of the amount of charge you have, or the amount of charge you need – Ionity gives both. That said you can easily spot the Fastned charging are by the yellow roof. One thing we have discovered is that whilst the infrastructure is great, the signage is terrible. Almost all of the service stations we have arrived at have had no, or nearly no, signage and you are left wondering how on earth to find the charging station! The Ionity service stations are far more subtle, but once you find them they are far better in facility. We charged up and popped into the shop to get a bottle of water for the car and for a quick nip to the loo. It needed to be quick – the service station was being renovated and the loos were temporary portacabins and not somewhere you would want to spend any time!

Now I really should explain about this car charging and how it works. When you set the destination on the car, it works out how many times you will need to charge and identifies where you can get the required charge. The SatNav directs you to the next charging stop and tells you how many minutes you will need to charge. This is fantastic but, it isn’t always as good as it could be. By way of example, yesterday the SatNav tried to direct us to a 50kW charger. Now, without putting too fine a point on it, we are frankly a bit sniffy about 50kW chargers after experiencing the 150kW chargers! We decided to ignore the SatNav as Captain Clarke has an app on his phone which tells us where the next 150kW charger is located. This has worked very well but ignore the SatNav at your peril! On one occasion when we were almost 50 kilometres past the charging point that it had chosen for us, it was still trying to get us to go back to it!

Charge complete we headed for Lyon for lunch. Now we had forgotten a golden rule in France … many restaurants shut for lunch and most shut on Sundays – what day was it? Sunday! There was literally nothing open! We walked around Lyon – here’s Captain Clarke to prove it – and we found that almost every restaurant was shut. There were a few that were open but they were so busy that it was never going to work out to get lunch. Captain Clarke needed something to eat because his blood sugar levels had gone down to four (and anything below five is bad news!) so we found an ice cream shop to get him something to eat. Eventually we came to the conclusion that lunch in Lyon was not destined to happen. We decided to return to the car and get back on the motorway and head to the nearest service station or ‘Aire’ as they are known. Over many years we have enjoyed stopping off in an Aire for a quick breakfast or lunch. They are always full of local dishes and delicacies that are cooked by the staff working there. Oops! We appear to have missed something … they are now full of MacDonalds, Subway and Starbucks. We got stuck in a fairly major traffic jam out of Lyon (36km to be precise) which took some time to get out of. When we eventually reached the first service area we were devastated to find that it was full of fast food restaurants. Undeterred we decided to give that one a miss and move onto the next one. Sadly, the next one was the same. What has happened to French cuisine? It was so disappointing! After much consternation and another huge traffic jam (what happened to those lovely open roads?) we made our way to a third Aire. Sadly, it was the same again and we bought some prepared food, a baguette for me of emmental and ham and a Caesar salad for Captain Clarke and retired to the car. The baguette was disgusting and after attempting to eat it, I discarded it to a bin. The salad was not much better but Captain Clarke managed to force it down. There’s a lesson here – don’t rely on the Aire’s anymore!

After another charge, we have spent a total of two hours charging throughout the entire journey, we made our way to the south. With no hotel booked, we decided to try and book a hotel through Booking.com – it was fairly easy but the old saying “a photo doesn’t lie” may not be quite so true! The hotel in Frejus, just about 90 minutes form Monaco, looked great on the website, it was not quite as billed. It IS cheap but it is definitely SBD (Seen Better Days). Although it is advertised as a hotel and restaurant, the restaurant is shut on Sundays! We did make our way to the port of Frejus and had a passable meal in a tourist kind of restaurant (everything else was closed) before returning to the hotel. The room is Ok, we booked a ‘superior room’ as this was the only one available. Goodness knows what a ‘standard’ room would be like. The room is small and ‘compact’ and has a strong smell of cat’s pee, otherwise it is wonderful! That said, the breakfast this morning was not at all chaotic and we agreed that it was actually better than our hotel yesterday! Today we will make our way to Monaco. We already have a hotel booked (at an embarrassing amount of money but fortunately we are not paying for that) we will park under the Grimaldi Forum were I will be speaking on Tuesday and Wednesday and walk the mile or so to our hotel. I have a couple of meetings this afternoon but hopefully we will have time this evening for me to show Captain Clarke around a bit in the town/city/Principality that I have been to every year for twenty years bar the last two! It will be interesting! Tonight the plan is to take him to the best Italian restaurant I know that is anywhere near Italy. The best Italian food I have ever eaten was in Seville which just goes to prove that Italy is not the best place to enjoy Italian food! So, today it is Monte Carlo or bust … it’s RudyMenTerry!