The Road to

MONACO 04

Part III

by Cannonball Bob

F1 statue by the track in monaco

By 9am, as we left the hotel, it was already becoming uncomfortably hot out of the shade. This, and our late arrival in Nice the previous night, meant I started the day already feeling a bit jaded. But it didn’t matter really. We had a fairly short itinerary and the seafront at Nice seemed the ideal place to take things easy.

The tall palm trees lining our route swished in a light breeze as well crawled along the three lane promenade that headed East towards Monaco. To our right the Mediterranean sparkled in the early morning sun and airliners lifting out of Nice airport glinted over head in a perfect blue sky.

The traffic along the coast road was heavy though, and we never really did anything more than jump from one set of lights to another. Nose to tail all the way. The infrastructure along this stretch of coast has to fit in to some awkward cliffs and accommodate small inlets and coves along the way, so the road clambers deliberately but monotonously over headland after headland. I felt we weren’t really getting anywhere.

Although I’d seen Monaco on TV or in film, I had no idea how to actually get to the heart of the place, so we just followed the coast road, assuming that if we kept the sea on our right we literally couldn’t miss it.

Sure enough, diving through a tunnel that appropriately separates Monaco from the edges of Nice, we’d arrived in the Principality. It was a bit like stepping through the Wardrobe of Lion & Witch fame. There were no notable changes in our surroundings at first, it just felt different, as though even the air itself was more expensive and exclusive.

Still fighting through traffic, the first recognisable landmark we encountered was the Marina, full of smooth, clean yachts all nodding gently on the slight tide washing through the moorings with Lego-brick apartments stacked up against the cliffs overlooking the whole scene. It was just two weeks after the Grand Prix left town, but the only tell tale signs were the grid positions still painted on the road, and the odd set of jet black tyre tracks imprinted across the tarmac in places.

Not sure of exactly where we were going I simply followed the car in front and unwittingly we’d soon covered the whole GP circuit, mostly in the direction of racing too. It’s very short, and very tight. Even in normal traffic it takes some driving.

Working more towards the centre of town, the true spirit of Monaco gently oozes out of the surroundings. The streets are clinically clean, the hotels and cafes have a more cosmopolitan air about them than those just along the coast in Nice, and here and there the kerbstones are painted alternate red and white. Look closer and the street furniture also hints at a Grand Prix alter-ego. Traffic islands are made up of old railway sleepers, all bolted together but laid loose over the tarmac and any road signs or traffic lights are removable, slotted in to holes in the ground.  But the place was packed, nose to tail traffic everywhere, pedestrians all over the place. Where you’d even begin clearing the streets to hold a Grand Prix is anyone’s guess.

The heart of Monaco is so compact, exploring by car simply doesn’t work,  so we disappeared beneath Casino Square in to the huge underground car park there to then explore a little on foot. This too was show-room clean, and the MG’s tyres squealed around every freshly painted corner of each floor.

At last, this was where the money really started to show, with Ferrari, Porsche, Aston Martin and Lamborghini deposited as though in some underground automotive bank vault.  Parked up alongside a 911 Turbo, it has to be said the two MGs didn’t exactly look out of place. Everything else was either stupidly expensively or tatty and cheap beyond words.  The MGs were exclusive in their uniqueness for this part of Europe and bizarrely, they stood out from the mostly Italian and German crowd.

 With the cars safely hidden underground we rode a short escalator back up to ground level, emerging just across the road from the Café de Paris, which itself is right outside the core of Monaco’s nuclear money reactor: Casino Monte Carlo. A grand set of steps led up to the casino’s heavily ornate entrance, and in the square outside a small collection of supercars lined the cobbled kerb. The gardens of Casino Square, with their neatly trimmed lawns and numerous flags wafting in the breeze in between sculptures, shrubs and terraces, were in stark contrast to the slightly disorganised and dusty seafront we’d travelled along earlier that morning. A small forest of neatly laid tables and regimented chairs filled the pavement outside the café and under the shade of one of the billowing parasols we ordered drinks and sat simply observing every day life in Casino Square.

Behind the Casino, overlooking the renowned Monaco hairpin, is the Grand Hotel Monte Carlo, where rooms and apartments are booked up years in advance for Grand Prix weekend when they cost thousands. Wandering further still leads down towards the sea and the tunnel under the same hotel. It’s all a bit surreal, for having seen it so many times at the height of the F1 season, everywhere was just being used as common through fares by the residents and tourists of this Mediterranean tax retreat.

With the time getting on towards mid afternoon we returned to the cars and departed, having achieved our goal of light refreshment in Café de Paris. A long way to go for a drink, but worth it, even if just to say we’d been.

Our planned return would simply be a case of eating as many miles as possible. We’d done all our sightseeing on the outbound leg, and in view of this, we stayed exclusively on the various peage and headed North again.

Towards evening heavy showers heralded our return to more Northerly climes, on one occasion catching us out with roofs down. It was all pretty bland heading home, but it had been a long day. At Villefranche, just past Lyon, we called it a day, arriving at another simple commuting hotel around dusk with just a short hop to Calais next morning.