The Old World Part II

As we left the terminal in Amsterdam for our flight to Nice France, we were herded onto a bus and driven to a plane waiting on the tarmac. Engraved in my memory is the last two couples to get on the bus. They were European with the men wearing sports jackets and looking very continental. They spoke in English and laughed and joked the during the short trip. The most striking thing was the assault on my nose of the odor of unwashed bodies. The men were well dressed but they smelled. Welcome to Europe.

The flight to Nice was short and before I knew it we had landed on the French Riviera. I saw the Mediterranean for the first time and the palm trees lining the access road next to the airport. As we went to collect our luggage, we discovered that two of our bags had managed to have been culled from the herd. So we went through the torture of trying to have our bags located in a foreign country. At least the KLM attendant spoke English and managed to trace our bags back to Amsterdam. We were assured that they would catch up with us at the hotel in Monte Carlo. We left the airport without going through customs and boarded the bus for the hotel.

The bus ride was interesting. The tour guide, for lack of a better definition, told us about all of the things we passed. What I saw was a crowded road with tolls about every two miles. It started raining shortly after we landed so it was much like northwest Ohio for cloud cover. The landscape looked like a colony of strip miners had invaded the area. The hill sides were all carved up with large terraces leading up to the top. It looked like a lunar landscape with red tile buildings perched on each level. For all of the bragging about France being the all that and a bag of bread, it was not very picturesque. By the time we got to Monaco, the splendor that would have been France was overshadowed by the Beverly Hills of Europe, Monte Carlo.

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