Germany (with a hint of France)

[Kyle]Leaving Prague, we started a twelve-hour, three leg train trip to the other side of Germany. Here, at Breisach on the Rhine River on the border with France, lives my High School friend Geoffrey, with his wife Sarah and their 4 year old son Andrea.

We were especially lucky because just a six-minute walk from their house, they have an unoccupied studio apartment, which they were kind enough to offer us for the duration of our stay.

The morning after our arrival, we emerged to find that Breisach is a surprisingly lovely little town. A spired cathedral sits atop a steep hill, along with houses that are part of the walled-in old city. Below the cliffs, like extra decorations that wouldn't fit on the cake above, Tudor and chalet-style houses and shops spread out into the space between the walls and the Rhine. To get to Geoff and Sarah's house from their apartment, the walk takes us through the only remaining stone gate and then across cobbled streets edged by welcome mats in German.

Geoff tells us that one of the good things about Briesach is that the whole town has speed limits of thirty km/h or less. I assume he means for Andrea's safety, because he can run around and play without speeding traffic to worry about. The thing is, I'm pretty sure little Andrea spends most of his time going faster than that (the kid's a blur), so they are just asking for a pocketful of speeding tickets.

We spent the first weekend with the family dividing our time between the house and walks through the town, plus a drive up into wine country for the views.

Beautiful Breisach in Germany is now home to Kyle's school friend Geoffrey, and his family

Murals adorn many of the area's homes

And the area is surrounded with the local wine industry

During the work week, Geoff and Sarah lent us their two electric bicycles. We really like electric bicycles. The terrain in this part of Germany is mostly flat, with a few hills thrown in for variety. The electric boost really helps to flatten out the hills, which made it easy to put in double the miles we would have even attempted on a manual bike. We had a lovely time, arriving back at the house weary and saddle-sore, but with big smiles at our day out in wine country.

The bicycles gave us the chance to explore some of the equally charming nearby towns and scenery, and it was easy to cross one of the many bridges over the Rhine to France

We had a rainy, cozy day at the house, and then we loaded up their car for a trip to the nearby "big" city of Freiburg. Sarah studied there in college and knows the place inside and out. It is also beautiful, but is a bit hectic compared to Briesach, making it necessary to constantly keep an eye on Andrea any time he gets to close to traffic or wanders too far into the crowd ahead. Briesach feels very much like a small island where anybody who finds him will happily take him by the hand and deliver him home.

Freiburg was the nearest German city, and we were expertly guided by Sarah who had studied there many years ago

One very nice touch to Freiburg (and many of the nearby towns) is the series of man made brooks (Bächle), mini-canals that run through the streets, once as water supply and fire protection. They remain now to keep the wine cool in the summer, and also provide drinking water for thirsty dogs, and allow children to tow little boats along them by strings.

A few days later, Geoffrey took us into Staufen, which is an impossibly pretty little village full of adorable shops and crisscrossed with the same type of miniature cooling canals as Freiburg.

Staufen was equally charming

On our last day in Breisach, which was also Easter Sunday, Geoff and Sarah booked us on a brunch cruise of the Rhine. It was just brilliant! It feels like a strange thing to say, but it was so nice to be out on the water, even if it was in a giant boat that had had no sense of the wavy motion of smaller boats. We went up and down the Rhine, including a transit each way of a big lock with a ten-meter lift. After last seeing Geoffrey and Sarah in French Polynesia in 2018, they subsequently went on to buy a canal boat, which they took through the canals near their base in Dublin, Ireland. One great statistic that Geoffrey told me was that, as an infant, Andrea had been through forty-three locks before he had ever ridden in an elevator. As we went along the Rhine, we reminisced about our respective time on various canal systems while enjoying a delicious meal.

And we were treated to a beautiful river boat lunch cruise on the Rhine, and managed a lock or two without having to touch any lines!

Briesach has been really great and Geoff, Sarah and Andrea have really made a nice life for themselves here. One of the first tidbits of information we were given about the town was that Breisach has five ice cream shops. (Maryanne found a secret sixth shop.) With my goal of collecting samples from all five (six), I had some structure to my visit, with which Andrea was all too happy to help.

Breisach is a regular stop on the river cruise ship route. They get a lot of Americans, but English is not particularly widely spoken. This is when it's great to have Geoff around. It's such a pleasure to watch him conversing at the Saturday Market with all of his German friends in their native tongue. He's always happy to step in and translate when I get stuck. He also speaks Swedish, Hindi and most of the other Scandinavian languages as well. At one point, he explained to me that since Breisach is a border town, French is also widely spoken. Geoff says he doesn't speak French, but he knows so much about languages generally that he is much better at it than I am, even though I think of French as the local language I have a chance at understanding. At one point, on a solo visit to ice cream shop number five, after not getting any of the proprietor's German, I remembered the thing about how I could use French. I accidentally said, "I'm sorry, I cannot speak English" in my best French, to which the guy responded, "Oh, you're American!", in English.

After explaining that I wasn't one of the passengers from the cruise ship, but that I was visiting a local friend, he looked a bit perplexed. When I explained about Geoffrey, a slight glimmer came over his face. When I mentioned Andrea, he knew exactly who I was talking about. Geoff told me a story about how on one of their first visits to Breisach, Andrea dropped his ice cream cone. Before anybody could even realize what had happened, the proprietor appeared with an exact replacement. That's the kind of place it is.

Adventures in Monte Carlo (Monaco)

[Kyle]After a long commute home to the boat in Toulon, I had to hit the ground running for our next trip. The forecast was for a switch from big tailwinds to big headwinds right around the time I was to get home, so I wanted to get as much of the tailwind as possible.


Leaving Toulon and preparing for Monaco - we'll need that courtesy flag!
We did fine leaving Toulon harbor and up until the next corner, where we turned right into the teeth of the building wind. We had 27 miles to go before we could turn the following corner and swing the wind back away from the bow, where we like it. We were also fighting a current so there was no benefit in turning off the wind more - if we did this we'd simply be going backwards! It took us all night to bash through those 27 miles. It was a long, miserable night. To add to the pounding, shaking, and low speeds, the weather was also spitting rain about half of the time.

I had originally hoped to make it to a protected anchorage by St. Rafael by about 3am, where we could catch up on some rest and wait out the rest of the blow until milder tailwinds kicked in midday. By the time we had made it through our 27 miles, it was already daylight. The wind had also made its predicted shift right about then. We were tired, but I only had a few days off of work, so we decided the best thing was to keep sailing right on up to Monaco.

After the corner, our sail was lovely summer sailing the whole way. It was painful, but we had so little time that we had to sail right past LOTS of places we wanted to see: St Rafael, St Tropez, Antibes, Cannes, Nice. At each one, a cluster of sailboats meandered around while in between, super yachts and mega yachts raced to the next place on their itineraries. (Mega yacht owners to super yacht owners: “Oh, you have a super yacht. How cute.”) It was all so beautiful. The little blue harbors were all backed by giant mountains of granite and marble covered with a pleasant mix of warm weather foliage that was heavy on flowers. As we passed Nice, with its busy airport, we started seeing a lot of helicopter traffic, mostly shuttling between the airport and Monaco.

Monaco stands out along this coast because it looks like Park Avenue has been wedged in between a mix of villages and villas on either side. The entire little country is jam-packed with mostly high-rise apartment buildings at the density of major capital cities.

As we approached, I asked Maryanne if she managed to obtain a Monaco courtesy flag (the one conspicuously missing from our compliment). With all that she had to during the past week, like building the passerelle, purchasing a Monaco flag had fallen off of the bottom of her list. Undaunted, she quickly dove into a locker and produced the materials, which she then spent the next hour or so hand sewing into a very high quality courtesy flag (She had decided pulling out the sewing machine was not worth the effort). Monaco has a very simple two-color design, so it wasn’t too difficult, but the quality was very good with nice, straight hems and even little loops sewn in for attaching the corners. It’s honestly nicer than most flags I’ve seen in stores. {Maryanne: Kyle is so sweet! This is just the second flag I’ve ever made, the first being a single yellow rectangle of the Q flag. With the seams an iron would have really made things easier, but we only needed the flag for 24 hours and I didn’t think anyone would have been inspecting it too closely – so I sewed it on route – just in time!}


First sights of high rise Monaco - and the Oceanographic institute
We arrived in Monaco just before sunset to the older and smaller of the two marinas: Fontvielle. What an incredible setting for a marina. On one side, it was bordered by the district of Fontvielle, which has the feel of an upscale American condo development, on the other, soaring way above the tops of even the largest masts was a vertical cliff topped by the cathedral and the palace grounds. At night, the cliffs are illuminated with colored floodlights for an even more dramatic effect.

Even though it was late and we’d just finished a 26-hour sail, we decided we just HAD to go out to the Casino Monte Carlo. Since a jacket and tie was required, I donned the Prince Charlie (Kilt) and we set off to walk across the country to the casino on the other side.

It seemed like it should have been straightforward enough. We immediately encountered a couple of problems. The first is that Monaco is not on a grid system. Since there are only a handful of roads, I assumed this wouldn’t be too much of a problem. We would just navigate by pilotage. This is easier when there’s a sun or some stars available for reference, but I’m still pretty good at finding things with my “I think it’s that way” method. Since Monaco is such a steep country, many of its roads look like Lombard street in San Francisco; very confusing. I still had a pretty good idea of where we were going, but Maryanne gave me a look that said she was less confident. Confidence regarding where we were going was something she wanted a high level of since she was dressed for the casino and wasn’t wearing the most comfortable of walking shoes.

The other problem was the cliff. There were no roads nor path at the base of the cliff and a sign at the entrance to the tunnel punching through clearly indicated no pedestrians; our only option became to go up, up and ever up. Once on the other side we could see the casino just beyond the newer, giant, marina, but there was still the question of how to get there. The Grand Prix had just ended a couple of days earlier and crash barriers and stadium seating blocked access to all ‘normal’ paths and crossings. We wandered this way and that for what seemed like a long time, looking for gaps in the barriers to reach our goal before we finally spotted a unusually small sign with an arrow indicating the casino was down and to our right (even though we could see it above and to our left). We descended the indicated stairway to find a marble lined tunnel which passed under the road, and joined up with elevators that discharged us onto the street about ½ block from the casino.


A late night foray into the unknown


Kyle at the Casino entrance wishing that it was his car parked outside!
On arriving at the casino via the grand entrance, the first thing we noticed (apart from everyone taking pictures) was a whole string of top end sports cars parked right out front (and hilariously, one mini cooper - how did that guy get to park there?). We paid our cover charge and went in. The casino is very grand and beautiful (no photography allowed, unfortunately. We couldn’t even find postcards of the inside), but it was surprisingly subdued. I’d expected such a famous place would be jam packed with people waiting for their chance at the tables, but there could not have been more than 100 people inside and only 8 tables in a relatively small, but grand, hall. Beyond was a second hall of quiet slot machines (no bells, no dinging, not even that much flashing! Just the restrained sounds of buttons being pushed).

In the main hall about half the tables were completely unoccupied (those with the high minimum bets) we went to the bar and purchased a couple of drinks (After both considering a Martini, shaken not stirred, Maryanne had a tequila sunrise and I had a whisky to match my outfit), but heck, you only live once right? The drinks were about €20 each, but to their credit the bar tender glugged generous portions – mine seemed to be at least a triple.

Back on the labyrinthine walk we had on several occasions remarked we were expecting it to be equally difficult to find our way home; the drinks certainly weren’t going to help with that!

We returned to the main hall and observed a few games. Most people were bandying about huge amounts of money (plenty of €500 notes being thrown on the tables in exchange for chips or even for direct bets). One guy changed his €10,000 chip into a €5,000 and a bunch of €50’s, about half or which he lost at the next spin of the wheel, all without the least hint of concern at all. I felt a bit phony asking the croupier for €50 of €5 chips. We played a hand full of numbers and mixes and lost on all. In the end, I tossed our last chip on the table and asked the croupier to put it on number 14 at the other end of the table for me. He used his pusher stick and moved it to approximately number 24 (oh well, no better chance of winning than number 14), soon afterwards another croupier at the table tidied up by moving it to one of the corners on the the grid, giving us 21, 22, 23 and 24 at lower odds. The marble struck 22 and €40 worth of chips in a neat stack were slid over to us. I briefly considered investing the €40 in another game, but then I realized those chips were real money that I could use for something lasting longer than 3 minutes (like a three hour train ride), and thought the better of it. I hadn’t really expected to come away rich, particularly at roulette, which has relatively poor odds, but I put on a bow tie, placed a bet at Monte Carlo and had the croupier slide me back a stack of chips. That was the full experience as far as I was concerned and I was quite happy. I didn’t need to spend my next seven paychecks trying to win enough for one of those cars.

We watched others do a lot of that instead until the hour started getting to us, then we decided to brave the walk back home. Outside, we found it drizzling. In no time, that turned into rain that quickly became bad enough to send people running for shelter in buildings and under awnings. We looked at each other and telepathically agreed to dive into a cab.


Kyle prepares for his invite onto one of the Grand Prix teams for next year - apparently if the bus can do it, so can he!
Even the cab ride was cool. About half of the way back was on the grand prix route. Since it hadn’t yet been dismantled it still looked like the grand prix route. It was pretty cool to go whizzing by crash barriers and zinging under big banners. The other cool thing was the tunnel to Fontvielle. It turned out not to be a tunnel at all, but a whole subterranean road system with turnoffs, intersections and even roundabouts. No wonder they didn’t want us walking in there.

The next morning, we worked out that our first 6 hours in Monaco cost us around $400. Ouch, that’s not sustainable.


Writing Postcards and sipping coffee outside the Casino
The sun woke us up later the same morning much earlier than we would have liked. We weren’t about to waste our giant marina fee sleeping, so we made coffee and headed out to get some pictures of the place in daylight. There was much less trial and error getting to the casino. We found all of the Lamborghini spots occupied by delivery vans. We sat at a café next door and watched the world go by while sipping espresso and Perriér Menthe watching Ferrari after Ferrari drive past.


Shopping Malls and the Cathedral - very grand





Exploring the top of the cliff, and the Palace
We headed back via the palace cliffs, which also held the Oceanographic Institute, the cathedral where the entire past royal family is entombed (including Grace Kelly) and what must be the most posh neighborhood in the whole world. From the tops of the cliffs, we could see Footprint down at the Marina. She really did look tiny amongst all of those giant boats.


Views from the cliffs - and Footprint sitting waiting for us to return
[Maryanne]Monte Carlo was to be a highlight of this trip and a destination I had been very much looking forward to ever since I understood it to be a possibility. The country and town (hard to distinguish between the two) have the feel of a grown up Disney Land. Everything is clean and perfect. There are no crumbling buildings, street litter, or graffiti. There are lots of public park areas with beautiful planting, and plenty of sculpture, fountains and other artwork. Many of the buildings have amazingly ornate paintings, mosaics or gilt work, along with beautiful balconies with cascading flowers, so each home seems very special. Even the only hospital we saw seemed like an elite and very grand resort from the outside.



A tidy town with lots of attention to artistic detail
All the boring things needed for day to day life (your basic high street stores, etc.) were hidden away underground and seemed accessible ONLY if you knew where to look for them. The street maps we had of Monaco seemed useless pretty quickly; the whole city/country is built in 3-D with major pedestrian walkways and even giant malls and supermarkets all underground cut well into the rocks – on the maps we had, only the roads and surface features seemed to be marked, and it was not even clear if these roads were always above or below ground… All made for good fun. We didn’t get to spend nearly as much time as we’d have liked there, but we DID make it there and we did win at the casino (OK, it might not have been more than the total we bet, but we did win). How cool is that!