View from my hotel room in Cros de Cagnes
Arriving at Cagne-sur-Mer train station, I somehow managed to get my suitcase off the train, but then got lost after taking the elevator up and across and then down again to get to the exit. I came across an elderly couple who like me, was also stuck next to an exit gate that was locked! Luckily, we came across a young Indian girl, who told us that we had to go back up in the elevator and walk all the way down the platform to a different exit at street level. As I emerged from the station, I looked for a taxi, but there were none to be found (no surprise). An elderly Swedish couple was standing at the taxi stand and told me that there had been no taxis arriving for the past 15 minutes. I went back inside the station and asked the lady behind the counter if she knew anything about the taxis and she said there likely wouldn´t be any coming as it was Sunday.
I then asked her where I could get a bus to the vicinity of the hotel that I had booked for just one night, ahead of my flight the next day. She kindly googled the address of the hotel from her mobile and discovered that it was a bit far away and that it was actually located much closer to another train station called Cros de Cagnes. I had to rush to the platform with my suitcase after buying a ticket, as the train going to Cros de Cagnes was just about arrive. An American lady in the queue behind me was freaking out as she needed to get onto the same train and she had no ticket. I think we did both somehow manage to get onto the train, though into different carriages. Luckily, it was only one stop from Cagnes-sur-Mer to Cros de Cagnes and the hotel was apparently located about 100 yards from Cros de Cagnes train station.
When I arrived at Cros de Cagnes, I discovered that it was an absolutely tiny station with no elevators and so once again, it was a case of dragging the suitcase down some stairs, walking, then dragging it up some more stairs to get out of the station. I walked towards the seafront as I knew that the hotel overlooked the beach. When I arrived at the hotel, I was confused. Round the back, was a red door which turned out to be an entrance to the back of a restaurant with a side door into the kitchen, but there was no actual reception. At the front of the hotel which faced the sea, was the entrance to the hotel´s restaurant. The view from my room, which was a couple of floors up some stairs (thankfully, the owner carried my suitcase up as there was no elevator and I was told the building used to be a fisherman´s house), was of the main road in front and in front of that, was the sea. It was nice to have a seaview and the view was nice enough, but nothing special, I thought.
View from the beach in Saint-Laurent-du-Var. (If you look closely, in the background you can see an Easyjet plane getting ready to take off).
The owner of the hotel told me that there was a very big shopping center close by and that I could walk there in about 15 minutes. Clearly, he had never walked there (or perhaps anywhere) himself and had no clue how long it takes to walk there, because in the end, it took me 40 minutes to walk to it. My foot was hurting quite a bit due to the tendonitis that I had acquired in Antibes, so I decided to stop at a crepe place along the beach in a place called Saint-Laurent-du-Var for lunch. I had a crepe with ham and cheese and a fresh orange juice. It was nice except for the fact that there were a few wasps that kept trying to sit on my crepe. After about 30 minutes, I carried on to the CAP 3000 shopping center.
The CAP 3000 shopping center near Nice Airport
image credit: http://www.rfr.fr/en
The CAP 3000 shopping center is very big and does have many shops. Indeed, it´s name is an abbreviation for Capacity 3000 places. Quite honestly, I found it too big and overwhelming and lost interest in doing any shopping within minutes of walking inside. However, in the end, I did find a pretty little necklace for my sweet little niece and then headed back out.
Before leaving, I got a takeaway from the Five Guys at the shopping center and then walked to the viewing area close to it, to watch the planes at Nice airport taxiing and taking off. I would say that´s probably the best thing about the CAP 3000 actually. Not the actual shops, but it´s location so close to the aiport. One thing I just don´t understand though, is why no matter which city I am in, when I go into a Five Guys (burger chain), there are ALWAYS pigeons roaming around inside! This Five Guys branch was no exception.
I left the shopping center and walked to the taxi stand. No taxis to be seen anywhere. I spoke to some teenage girls at the nearby bus stop. They seemed to be on their way home from school. They were all very nice and friendly, but none of them had never even heard of Cros de Cagnes! Luckily, there was a Novotel hotel near to the taxi stand, so I went in and asked the man at the reception if he might be able to call me a taxi, which he did. It was supposed to arrive in five minutes, but took around 25 minutes to arrive. I later discovered that the reason why there were no taxis at the taxi stand was because there was some sort of sporting event (a women´s Ironman type event) going on in the area and some of the roads had been closed.
The taxi cost an extortionate 25 euros to travel the ten minutes it took to get back to my hotel. On the way, the Lebanese taxi driver told me that taxis are actually considered to be a luxury in the Cote d´Azur and that people living there only used them for special occasions as they are so expensive. He recommended using Uber or Bolt. He was talking about how expensive life is on the Cote d´Azur and told me that the previous weekend, he had taken his two young children out for dinner and it had cost him over a 100 euros for himself and his kids to eat out at a restaurant in the area. As we arrived at my hotel, he told me that as a child, he had grown up in the vicinity of that very hotel and that he used to go the beach opposite. I got out of the taxi, climbed the many stairs up to my room, and decided to have an early night, as the next day, I would be flying to Alicante, Spain. Little did I know what awaited me the next morning….
I slept relatively well, but woke up around 7 am to the sound of heavy rain and lightning and thunder outside, as a storm descended over the sea. I was worried that my flight might be delayed because of the storm. However, after a few hours, the rain seemed to be clearing. I headed down to breakfast, which was in the adjoining building, and was immediately accosted by the same cleaning lady that I had seen when I arrived the day before. She was possibly Vietnamese and was working in the breakfast area as her boss had not come in due to the weather.
She immediately and repeatedly began to ask me if I had checked out and started asking me to take my suitcase out of the room because she needed to clean the room and finish her work so she could go home! This was at about 10 am and checkout was not until noon! At this point, I had not even had a chance to serve myself from the buffet or sit down to eat my breakfast. The woman, who looked to be in her mid to late forties, seemed to be very (abnormally) hyperactive and overly excitable. As she continued to harass me, I told her that she was making me stressed and asked her to leave me alone. I then called over the friendly young French guy who was working in the restaurant as a waiter, and who had been the first person I met when I arrived at the hotel the day before, and I complained to him about the woman´s behaviour. She witnessed this, became quiet, and stayed at a distance, going back to cleaning windows in the restaurant.
I finished my breakfast and asked whether someone could come and help bring my suitcase down at noon, the checkout time. The French waiter guy said he would, but at noon, there was no sign of him. However, suddenly, the Vietnamese woman arrived at the top of the stairs where I was waiting with my suitcase, and began doing a lot of really exaggerated, super fake crying. I said, ´Why are you crying?´ She said, ´I´m SOOOO soooorry for youuu´, then began bawling, but in a totally fake and obviously exaggerated way, then did some more fake crying (including instant and copious fake tears). I said, ´Stop crying´. She immediately stopped and her face became serious instantly. The fake tears stopped as well. Like switching off a faucet. She was clearly quite experienced at fake crying. I saw that she was about to take my suitcase down and so I said, ´No, you will hurt yourself. It´s too heavy. The man is supposed to bring it down, you should call him´. It seemed pretty obvious to me, that the whole thing was a set up and that he had sent her up to do the fake crying and bring down the suitcase in the hopes that I wouldn´t write a bad review (believe me, their ruse did not work).
So at this point, her tears have already disappeared completely , she´s looking serious and showing zero emotion on her face and calmly says, ´Okay´. She went downstairs and called the man who was standing down there waiting. He came upstairs, said nothing, and carried my suitcase down. I started to walk down the stairs, but suddenly, at the exact moment when I passed by a room that I didn´t know she was in, I hear the cleaning lady through the slightly open door of the room in which she is crouched down on the floor, pretending to clean. She stares at me and starts bawling and fake crying AGAIN! I was quite shocked, but looked away, ignored her completely, and carried on down the rest of the stairs. I went outside and stood next to my big suitcase, waiting for the taxi that I had asked the guy to book for me. I said to the guy, ´Is she normal?´´I don´t know ´he said, in that very French way, and grinned. He said bye and went back inside the restaurant while I continued to wait for the taxi.
You would think that that was the end of it, but you would be wrong. Oh No! Every few minutes, the cleaning lady would pop out of one of the two adjacent doors of the hotel (the one leading to the restaurant or the one leading to the rooms) and look directly at me, while sticking her head out from behind the door, and then fake crying with fake tears and bawling, then coming out and going into the next door building. A few minutes later she would come out of that door and repeat the whole sequence and then go into the other building!
This carried on for at least ten minutes, and then she finally gave up and disappeared as I was not looking at her at all and had wheeled my suitcase further away from the hotel in order to increase the distance between her and myself while waiting for the taxi. The chef, who I could see in the kitchen, saw me and nodded. I nodded back. I was thinking, I´m sure this man (and all of them) must know full well that this woman is an absolute crackpot. Quite honestly, it was one of the most insane and disturbing experiences of my life. It was all very surreal and highly disconcerting. Finally, the taxi arrived and it was a short journey of about 15 minutes to get to Nice airport. Short, but still expensive at about 30 euros.
At the airport, I realized that my phone battery had drained and there was no way to get into my whatsapp messages where, a lady I had met in Antibes was going to message me about meeting at the airport, as she was also heading to Spain that day, around the same time. In any case, eventually, it turned out that she was at a different terminal, so we didn´t meet up afterall and she later ended up stranded in Barcelona airport overnight as her Vueling flight to Granada got cancelled last minute.
I couldn´t check in my suitcase as I was too early and you can only check in luggage from two hours before the flight. There were no plug points to be found apart from two near a seating area that were already being used by a Bulgarian man in his 30s who seemed so relaxed that I wondered if he actually lived at the airport. However, a polite young guy from South America (I think he said he was from Colombia, but had lived in Germany), who was probably only around 19 or 20 and who was sitting next to the Bulgarian guy, very kindly let me use his powerbank to charge my phone. Later, I looked after his luggage as he went to look around the shops for a charging cable. It turned out that he was on his way to Barcelona for a job, but his employers had booked him a very late flight and he would have to wait at the airport for about six more hours! He was going to be picked up at the airport in Barcelona and then driven an hour north to a port where he would be working on a boat.
I thought it was very exploitative of his employers. I mean, there are so many flights to Barcelona all day long, it´s a short flight, and yet they made him take the flight late at night, knowing he would have start work on the boat the very next morning! No doubt they got him that flight because it was cheap… He said he´d had to leave the crew house that he had been staying at due to their checkout time rules. It turned out that he had previously worked on boats in Mallorca as well and that his mother lived there and had been there during the pandemic, during which time I was living there too (will tell you all about my island girl years another time).
So anyway, it was finally time to check in my luggage, but oh what a mess it was at the queue for checking in luggage! Instead of announcing over the intercom, when passengers for certain flights could come to the front of the queue and cut the queue due to time running short, or managing which passengers entered the queue first, there were just a couple of women staff who would occasionally shout the name of a destination, but not very loudly at all, and only a few people, who were already at the front of the queue could hear them! Luckily, I had already waited in the winding queue for about 40 minutes, so was close to the front, when the woman said (not even loudly), ´Alicante´. I finally got my suitcase checked in and headed off to security and waved goodbye to the young guy, who was now settling into his seat in another area of the airport lobby for his six hour wait.
Bye bye Nice, Hello Alicante
image credit: Google Maps
When the plane finally took off and we were somewhere between France and Spain, I can´t describe how relieved I felt to be leaving the south of France and going to Spain. The relief was mainly due to knowing that I could stop having to pay so much for so little once I arrived in Spain. I did really like some of the places along the Cote d´Azur such as Mandelieu-la-Napoule and the Old Town of Antibes, and I found French people (apart from the crazy woman at the hotel), to be very nice, polite, and helpful. However, overall, I felt kind of cheated.
The Cote d´Azur is always presented as being very chic and beautiful. Well, tbh, I didn´t find it to be particularly chic. It is pretty, but, I would say that the beaches in Mallorca are far more stunning, and while Mallorca is not cheap, it´s nowhere near as horribly expensive as the Cote d´Azur. (However, I have to be honest and say that the level of xenophobia and anti-foreigner resentment and hostility towards foreigners in Mallorca is high, whereas I never experienced that on the Cote d´Azur). In any case, I started to understand why so many French people go to Spain instead of the south of France for their seaside holidays and why my friend from Grasse told me that it´s mainly wealthy, older, or retired people that visit the Cote d´Azur or live there and that there aren´t so many young people there. It´s simply unaffordable.
And so, after just an hour and a half in the air, I was already landing in Alicante and feeling quite good about it. After arriving in Alicante, I took the bus to the city center, getting off at Porta del Mar, which is very close to Postiguet beach. I decided to have dinner at one of the restaurants at the beach and ended up having a really nice seafood paella while looking at the very pretty, pink sunset. I then walked into the city, to find the hostal that I had booked for two nights.
Dinner at Vino y Mas on Calle de las Setas (Mushroom street)
The second night, I had a nice dinner sitting outside at a restaurant on the well-known ´Mushroom street´. The next day, I was supposed to be moving to an apartment in Gran Alacant. However, the booking, which was with booking.com via an external partner, was not honoured by the owners and so, they had taken my money, but I had nowhere to stay! I had to spend endless hours calling booking.com for the next two weeks to try to resolve the matter. Therefore, I absolutely do not recommend external partners on booking.com as it is the second time that I had a last minute cancellation by them, that left me stranded.
So anyway, then began the frantic search for a place to stay and finally, I ended up at a hotel close to the Ajuntament (town hall) in Alicante city center, where I stayed for two nights. I booked a different apartment in Gran Alacant and as my taxi approached the area, I thought…where on earth are we? It was quite far from Gran Alacant Centro Commercial (and from pretty much everything), where I had stayed the year before. It was very hilly and a very strange locale. A bit like a tiny village with 50% English from the north of England, and 50% Spanish. A very odd and insular enclave. Not unfriendly, but not welcoming either. However, there is a very good Indian restaurant, called Good View that also does Mexican food and indeed, it does have a very good view from across the street!
Zoomed in view from across the street from Good View restaurant, Gran Alacant. To the very left, you can see the hill that Santa Barbara castle is on.
Delicious chicken madras with pilau rice at Good View restaurant, Gran Alacant
The apartment was peaceful initially, but then began the usual construction noise that you have no matter where you go in Spain (this time from the apartment directly above, which was apparently being renovated). However, there were very nice views from the apartment, of pine trees and the sea, including views of the bay of Alicante. The hill that the Santa Barbara castle sits on was also clearly visible.
Sunset view from the apartment in Gran Alacant
I tried the tourist train that does a circuit via Gran Alacant Centro Commercial and back. Okay, what can I say. It was a VERY bumpy ride as it seems to have extremely bad (non-existent) suspension. It was truly awful (likely hazardous to your joints and bones) when it went over the speed bumps, and the lady driver did not stop at my stop on my way back despite me pressing the button repeatedly, so I had to walk back about 150 meters to where I was staying. I certainly won´t be taking it again!
As you will know if you´ve read my previous posts, I had terrible tendonitis due to walking on cobblestones in Antibes, so having to walk back that distance was slow and painful. Oh wait actually, that reminds me of what happened earlier and how I came to get on the tourist train in the first place. I had walked a long way along the hilly road from the apartment to the only pharmacy in the area which is down a residential side street.
A tall, thin, sneaky, young woman working in the pharmacy was frankly one of the most awful people I came across on my trip around Spain. I was asking whether they had any of the gel pads that you can put into your shoe to cushion it or any compression bandages. However, she was only intent on telling me that nothing other than physiotherapy would help me and that I must go next door to the physiotherapy place that they obviously had set up some business deal with. It was vile and luckily, when I went to pay, the older (and much more honest) lady told me that the bandage the younger girl had given me was not for my type of tendonitis. I left purchasing just some paracetamol and feeling glad that I had not wasted my money on the bandage and felt relieved to get away.
Just as I left the pharmacy, the white tourist train was coming up the road and given my foot pain, I decided to hail it and got on. It took us on a long and winding route around the area and then down the hill to Gran Alacant Centro Commercial, where, as it was around 2pm, many of the shops were closing. However, I did manage to get a pair of comfy matte gold sandals that were on sale. I put them on immediately, putting my flip flops into the bag, and headed to Cafe Navia, a cafe that I had been to the year before. I can highly recommend this cafe as they not only have good food and coffee at decent prices, but their staff are always friendly and polite, even to foreigners! Unfortunately, that´s not always the case in Spain, but we´ll talk about that more another time.
So, after five days in this strange backwater/wildnerness, I decided I needed to get back to the city. I booked a studio on the 21st floor in Alicante city center that had great views of the city and the port. While there, I finally managed to get my iphone battery and screen replaced and got to know the various streets leading into Luceros, which is the main station for taking trams around Alicante and up the coast. The studio was clean and modern, but was unfortunately in an old building called Estudiotel which is one of the tallest, if not tallest buildings in Alicante city center.
Sadly, while it has great views from the higher floors, it also has cockroaches in its pipes! After being completely disgusted seeing several baby cockroaches in the bathroom, I immediately packed and checked out early, heading to different aparthotel. As I was too early to check in, I stopped at a cafe called where I had a croissant filled with pistachio cream and a coffee. The new aparthotel was next to a smallish square and playground/park (Placa Seneca) where many children came to play in the evenings. Strangely, people were also walking their dogs and letting their dogs poop in the very same park where the children were playing! The next evening, as I was coming back to the aparthotel and it was starting to get dark, I realized that quite a few drunk and homeless men roam the streets in the area and unfortunately, many of the side streets in this area of the city center were quite dirty.
After four days in the city center, I thought it was time to head to the beach and back to Playa San Juan, where I had stayed the year before. Playa San Juan is mainly a residential area with nice clean streets, clean and convenient trams, a nice clean and long stretch of beach with view of the mountains in the distance, some cafes and restaurants, and just lots and lots of apartment blocks (old and new). There, I stayed at two different hotels and had absolutely awful experiences at both due to the unprofessional conduct of extremely disrespectful and dishonest reception staff. Unfortunately, customer service is abysmal (or non-existent) and the concept professionalism is often entirely absent at many Spanish hotels (and many other service-oriented businesses). But let´s not spoil the mood. I´ll tell you a lot more about all of that some other time.
In any case, I felt I had had quite enough and needed to see a bigger city, and so I found myself booking a one way train ticket to…..Valencia. I´ll tell you all about my trip to Valencia in my next post!
For daily magic from the universe ✨ 
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