Nice Day 1 - A few final Preparations
Monday 22nd January 2007
David and I went to work at the HostelBookers offices in London that morning to get the few final preparations in place for the trip to Visit Nice Hostels. We left the city at around 10:30am and made our way to Victoria station to catch the Gatwick Express to Gatwick Airport. Our flight to Nice was at 14:20. With an effortless check in we hung around the departure lounge and discussed some plans for the trip.
On route I managed to sleep for the most part while David got stuck into doing some work on his laptop. Within an hour and a half we arrived in Nice, the weather from my aeroplane window looked particularly grim but when we actually got outside it was pleasantly mild. Something I was particularly pleased about having spent a few days in Turin, Italy the previous week feeling ever so miserable because of the freezing cold and windy weather.
With a fair bit of travel under my belt at this stage I found the process of making our way to the centre of the city incredibly easy. There have been times when it’s taken hours and endless questions to find our destination from the often out of town airports that the budget airlines normally fly to. This unusual bit of luck left David and I in good spirits as we took the bus from Terminal one at Nice airport to just near the property where we would spend the first two nights of our trip. Given the opportunity we would love to stay at all the properties we work with so we could truly experience what they are about but with limited time and several meetings we had to choose the most central of accommodation choices to accommodate us on our visit.
The journey from Airport to our bus stop took about 40 minutes although we must take into account that we were travelling in peak hour traffic. Ordinarily I would imagine the journey would be a little quicker. From Terminal 1 we took the No.23 bus towards the centre of town, we had been instructed to get off the bus on the second stop after the main train station which is called Gare SNCF. The bus was jam packed with excitable school kids so we were happy to get off and make our way to Hotel, Compte de Nice where we could have a rest before heading out for dinner and a quick pint before heading back for some much needed sleep.
We wondered down the main street down to the beach, it was completely dark now so we weren’t able to make out too much about our surroundings. That would have to wait until morning. Having had a good look around at the menu on offer at the various restaurants around the beach front we settled on a quaint little restaurant away from the main street where we enjoyed a lovely meal and a good beer. Feeling rather sleepy and satisfied after dinner we took a leisurely stroll back to the hotel and if I am not mistaken we were asleep by 10.
David and I had each been allocated a lovely little apartment which was part of the hotel. With basic kitchen facilities, television, en-suite bathroom and wi-fi access in the lobby lounge it had all we needed.
