Our 2019 US road trip has been unforgettable in so many ways, not least for the spontaneity that’s characterised it. Within the broader travel plan, involving stopping off at various scheduled points during the journey from San Francisco to Boston, we’ve deliberately left the activities and adventures we might experience at each place unplanned and to be decided upon on the day. This has resulted in such jewels as the last-minute dash to the Bazaar Café in San Francisco in an effort to get on the list to perform, and then playing a battered house guitar at what turned out to be a wonderful open mic with a friendly, appreciative crowd; the afternoon beer and chat with a bunch of locals at the Whiskey Creek Saloon in Hollister, California, about everything from whether we knew the Queen of England to details of our proposed trip; getting to play one of my songs at the coveted Bluebird Cafe open mic in Nashville; and spending a fabulous evening in the company of Doyle and Debbie, enjoying their brilliantly funny country-music-themed comedy at the legendary Station Inn.

But it’s also led to more poignant moments – such as coming across so many homeless people living on the streets of the cities we visited. The Haight-Ashbury part of San Francisco – the birthplace of the free love movement in the Swinging Sixties – was where we first became aware of the appalling hopelessness experienced by many of these people – a hopelessness borne by becoming completely spaced out and existing in some other world to this one that’s failed them so badly.

On the other side of the country, on our first evening in New York, we came across a similarly desperate picture. We’d eaten at an Italian restaurant in Little Italy, where pepperoni was found – too late – to have been liberally dotted across our ‘vegetarian’ margherita pizza, so we were given a replacement, this time smaller but sans meat. Angry that they’d got our order so wrong, we weren’t really interested in eating any more pizza, so we asked them to box it up and then headed back up to our Airbnb apartment on the Upper East Side, determined to find a hungry homeless person to give it to along the way. Unlike earlier that evening, there was not one needy person in sight – until a rather fulsome woman finally came up to me when we came out of the subway and said she was very hungry and could I help her out? Delighted to have found someone to bestow my beneficence upon, I said, ‘Well, I’ve got just the thing for you – a whole pizza! It’s in this box, and it’s for you!’ To which she replied, ‘I’m allergic to the tomato sauce on pizzas… Can you give me money for something else instead?’ Somewhat deflated and taken aback, I reluctantly fumbled in my pocket for loose change and gave her the 75 cents I found in there, not quite knowing whether to be annoyed with her or with myself…

Another very unexpected but highly emotional moment occurred at, of all places, a souvenir shop in the departure lounge at Nashville Airport. I’d been rifling through the rack of T-shirts on sale at the front of the store for a while, trying to decide which one to buy, and feeling sure that I was being watched by an eagle-eyed assistant behind the till. But when I finally made my decision and went to the counter to buy the T-shirt, I was greeted by a red-eyed, clearly distressed woman who took one look at me and could no longer hold back her grief…

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there,’ she began. Then: ‘I was on the phone to my sister. I lost my thirteen-year-old wiener dog last night…’ At that, she burst into tears and I, with two ‘wiener dogs’ (dachshunds) of my own, felt that I was right where I needed to be.
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‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be laying this on a customer,’ she wept.

‘It’s absolutely okay,’ I told her. ‘I have two wieners of my own, and I know how terrible it is to lose a beloved pet. I’m so sorry for you.’

‘Some people just don’t get it,’ she said. ‘They say, “It’s just a dog – get over it!” But he was my life – I slept with that dog in my bed for thirteen years, and now he’s gone.’ She cried again.

I wanted to console her, to let her know that I understood, so I showed her a picture of Silva and Chilli, and she calmed down a bit and said her dog had been a smooth-haired black and tan with a face like Silva’s. Then she said that her other dog was also in a state of grief at having lost her companion. When I suggested that she might get another companion for her, she wept again, saying that her living situation made it impossible for her to get another dog.

Eventually I paid for the T-shirt and walked out of the shop, feeling so sad for this complete stranger and her surviving dog, both of them pining away with no one to help them through what, to a dog lover, is tantamount to losing a family member.

By complete canine contrast, we spent four days becoming acquainted with the gorgeous Titus, a ten-year-old chihuahua mix who had been consistently and unaccountably overlooked at the dog shelter by prospective adopters, but who is now happily ensconced in the home of my friend Elizabeth, both of them counting themselves equally lucky to have found each other!

Random stories, touching vignettes, unexpected incidents, friends we’ve stayed with and come to know better, strangers whose lives briefly crossed paths with ours and then went on their way – these are the things that have made this trip so precious and so utterly memorable.
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And it’s not even over yet!

In thinking back over our brief overnight stay in Vegas, we agreed that it was such a surreal, time-turned-on-its-head experience that it’s hard to say exactly what we did and the order in which we did it... So I won’t tax myself unduly in trying to piece it together again - suffice to say we began our stay by arriving in the early hours on Sunday morning, having driven across the Mojave Desert, and celebrated by having (as you do in Vegas) Bacardi and Diet Cokes and Budweisers for breakfast, and ended our stay by strolling along the Strip at 3 a.m. and then losing what we could afford to lose at the roulette table while having an early breakfast of... Bacardi and Diet Cokes and Budweisers... However, by then we’d worked out that you only get ‘free’ drinks in Vegas when you’re spending money gambling, so at least that time they were ‘free’ (if you don’t take into account what we lost at the roulette table). Most of the croupiers seemed a tad jaded, apart from one lovely one who chatted to us about sights we needed to see in the desert - all the while quietly raking away our losing chips...

The other thing I’d like to say about Vegas is that I didn’t find walking along the Strip in searing heat the most pleasurable pastime, not only because of the heat but also because you can’t simply walk in a straight line from one end to the other. Instead, you have to go up and down escalators or stairs and across walkways over the busy thoroughfares. We zigzagged our weary way back and forth to get to Caesar’s Palace, at the other end from the Tropicana where we were staying, only to find the roulette tables way too expensive to even consider losing any money there. Night time on the Strip was much more pleasant, with fewer people and a lower temperature - definitely the way to go! Except that when you get back to your hotel in the early hours, you might well expect to stumble across a couple feverishly making out on your corridor. It’s best to do the British thing in such a situation, and hide your eyes by putting your hand across the appropriate side of your face while muttering, “Sorry! Sorry! Don’t mind us! Sorry!”

I developed a bit of a complex about being pounced on every time I ventured onto the Strip by the many and varied purveyors of skin-firming lotions and potions. Being too polite, and too heat-weary, to tell them where to go, I ended up with both eyes firmly glued open from dawn to dawn, and with a bag full of samples to keep the pesky wrinkles away. I did, however, resist shelling out hundreds of dollars for bottles of the products - so maybe I wasn’t quite as naive as they pegged me as being... Maybe.

By the time we checked out of the hotel on Monday morning, we were feeling somewhat jet lagged from such a bizarrely unreal experience (yet my eyes remained firmly pinned wide open) and not quite ready for yet another long drive through the desert to get to Lake Montezuma in Arizona... but we’re such troopers, so we did it anyway!
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We decided to visit the small Californian city of Soquel, near Santa Cruz, as part of our road trip as I’d lived there very briefly a long time ago and wanted to show Carol the delights of that area nestled on the Pacific coast between the ocean and the Santa Cruz Mountains. The drive there from San Francisco took us along the fabulous Route 1, which follows the Pacific Ocean all the way down the west coast, but when we reached Santa Cruz, it turned out to have been so long ago that I had lived there that I barely remembered anywhere we drove through, and even struggled to recall the name of the street that I’d lived on. I did, however, remember the name of one iconic café in Santa Cruz (and shall refrain from giving its name in order to preserve its iconic status), so we went there for breakfast the morning after we arrived – but ended up stomping out, with me clutching a takeaway box containing the burrito I’d ordered but that had failed to materialise when Carol’s meal arrived. It turned out that somehow my order had never been given to the cook, so by the time it finally did arrive, Carol had finished hers and I was so angry and stomach-churny that I demanded they take it off the bill, and had to be persuaded to even take the wretched boxed-up meal away with me. I would soon be glad I had done, though, as I was by then really hungry, and once we were safely away from the iconic place, I tucked into it rather ravenously.

Another institution I remembered from my few months there back in the late '80s was the Saturday flea market that runs from 6 a.m. to early afternoon. So, with me still munching the botched burrito, we headed over to the large car park on which it’s held, paid our dollar fifty each, and found ourselves sauntering around a car boot sale California-style. By the time we’d finished looking at guitars with strings missing (though not the one in the photo - that was a decent one, but it wasn't for sale!), grubby old clothes, boots that had seen better days, and other assorted potential gems, it was clear that tat is tat the world over, whether it’s sold out of an old estate car in a field in Essex or from the back of a battered pick-up truck in a parking lot on the Pacific coast.

The other thing I wanted to show Carol was the famous Santa Cruz boardwalk, allegedly the one referred to in the Drifters’ song ‘Under the Boardwalk’. But when we got there, I felt sad to see it had become so grossly over-commercialized and was now nothing more than mass of elaborate theme park rides – so we carried on down the coast and came to Seacliff State Beach, with its lovely old wooden pier replete with keen fishermen, and a wreck at the end that’s become a sanctuary for seabirds, including pelicans – as well as a lone sea lion we watched swim along the line of the shore, to the consternation (mixed with delight) of the children who happened to be swimming in the sea at the time it made its appearance. Other unusual (in the UK at least!) species we spotted in the area included a hummingbird (in the back garden of the house we stayed in) and, further inland, a vulture…

Our Las Vegas hotel reservation was for 3 p.m. the next day, so we’d originally planned to drive there overnight. But having done all we wanted to do in the Santa Cruz area by early afternoon, we decided to press on then and take our time ambling over to the Nevada gambling mecca. That decision led us to stop at Hollister, California, a small town lying an hour or two inland from Santa Cruz and at the heart of a major salad-crop-producing region of the USA. We were looking for a bar, any bar, as we were both thirsty by then and in need of liquid refreshment, but it was by pure chance that Carol decided to park where she did. It turned out to be virtually outside the Whiskey Creek Saloon – from its name alone you can tell that it was exactly what we were hoping to stumble upon – an all-American dive bar full of locals intrigued by two Englishwomen stepping in and ordering Blue Moons and telling the bartender about their west–east road trip. A lovely group conversation ensued, and we eventually left there with our heads reeling with all the different routes suggested to us as the best way to get to Vegas, and wondering (yet again) why Americans seem to be so very obsessed by the British royal family…

A very sensible and valuable suggestion, though, was that we refuel at Bakersfield, as after that we’d be hitting the Mojave Desert – at night – and we definitely didn’t want to run out of petrol (or rather, ‘gas’) there…

When, months ago, Carol and I planned this trip in celebration of my birthday, we agreed that although neither of us liked flying, we’d have to endure quite a bit of it if we were going to make it from the west coast of the USA to the east coast in a month with two week-long stopovers en route. I imagined us clinging on to each other in mutual clammy-handed panic as the planes took off, bumped and lurched through bouts of turbulence, and came in to land. In other words, as far as my overactive imagination was concerned, most of our flying time would be taken up with us clinging on to each other for dear life.

The reality turned out to be quite different. Not so much for the first, mercifully short flight from Gatwick to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris – neither of us having flown for some time, we were both as sweaty-palmed and unreasonably terror-ridden as I thought we’d be. However, having made it safely there, Carol seemed to calm right down, and for the mammoth eleven-hour flight that followed, from Orly Airport to San Francisco, she managed to sleep so soundly that even when I roughly grabbed her hand for mutual comfort during the bumpy ride 40,000 feet above Greenland, she barely came to, and limply held my hand back in an unsatisfactorily semi-automatic way while remaining blissfully out of it in the land of nod. Hmmph!! So much for aviophobic solidarity!

By the time we reached San Francisco, my head was throbbing with a migraine brought on by tension, dehydration and lack of sleep. Carol, however, was positively blooming. Until, that is, we set foot in the apartment we’d booked to stay in for the two nights we’d be there, when we were both almost knocked out by the malodorous whiff of unemptied cat litter trays. Yaaargh!!! We’d been warned ahead of time that there might be a little bit of a feline smell - but this? My headache kicked into nauseated overdrive, while Carol, ineffectively holding her nose, went from blooming to ominously silent. The smell wafted up the stairs into our bedroom, and it was only because I was thoroughly exhausted by then that I managed to fall into a heavy slumber almost immediately. Carol slept too, but the next day remained ominously silent when we awoke and encountered once again the pong of undealt-with kitty litter.

As a result, we spent that entire day, including the evening, avoiding the flat and instead exploring the streets of San Francisco, travelling from one end of the city to the other via its famous mass transit system where trains miraculously transmogrify into buses and ancient-looking street cars rattle up and down the startlingly steep gradients that are San Francisco’s hallmark.

On the number 24 bus, we made our way down Castro, proudly festooned along most of its joyous length with rainbow flags, rainbow window displays, rainbow crosswalks, rainbow everything, and then transferred onto the historic streetcar that would take us to Pier 39 and Fisherman’s Wharf, where we were amused by the blubbery antics of the highly entertaining sea lions and visited the fabulous penny arcade museum. For 50 cents, I had my fortune read by a sinister-looking yet strangely lifelike ‘grandmother’ and also, perhaps too publicly, had my feet massaged rather pleasantly by a vibrating machine… What was even more enjoyable, however, was seeing so many young people being swept up by the fun of the hall of mirrors, early space invaders machines, automated but archaic bowling alleys, and, for two dollars, the joyful sound and sight of a mechanically operated Wurlitzer organ.

From there, we decided to hop on the streetcar again and head up to the other area for which San Francisco is so well known – Haight-Ashbury, where the hippie movement and free love began in the Swinging Sixties. For several blocks, Haight is lined with vintage and retro clothing stores, ‘smoking’ shops, crystal and incense establishments … and homeless people at every corner, stoned, sad, and seemingly without hope.

As the Bay area's notorious cold mist descended and day turned into evening, we hopped on a bus and made our way to the Bazaar Café on California Street, where I’d found out an open mic would be happening later. I was too late to sign up for the main list, as it was pre-booked, but I was top of the ‘alternate’ list, and pretty much assured of being able to play one song on the house guitar (as I didn’t have my own with me). In the end, as one person cancelled, I made it onto the list proper, and got to play two of my songs on an acoustic guitar with a ‘hand of God’ painted on its soundboard that had a hole mysteriously knocked through it, but that sounded pretty good despite the hard life it had clearly had. It was a lovely evening, with a listening and appreciative audience, and the positivity continued when we got back to the whiffy flat at about 11 to find that the litter trays had been cleaned in our absence and that the smell, as a result, was, thankfully, somewhat diminished. Another sound night’s sleep ensued, and the next morning we got ready to pick up the rental car in which we would be embarking on the road trip proper…

It was a very special treat courtesy of Carol – tickets to the C2C country music festival at the O2 in London. Amazingly for me, it would be the first time I had been to the festival, having managed to miss it for one reason or another every previous year. We were coming back from France for a week, and happily for us, the festival fell on the weekend we would be in the UK, so we could comfortably manage the Friday evening show.

On the bill, I was thrilled to see, was Cam, whose song ‘Mayday’ I love, and who I admire as a fellow singer songwriter. Also performing was Brett Eldredge, and headlining was none other than Keith Urban. I confess to knowing more about Cam than I do about Keith, other than that he is Australian, is married to fellow Ozzie Nicole Kidman, is quite cool looking and has a great song, ‘The Fighter’, on which he duets with Carrie Underwood. So I was looking forward to finding out more about the man and his music.

At this point I want to say that I don’t think the pre-event publicity for C2C was brilliant, especially for us C2C virgins. Before we got there, we hadn’t realised that the music events got under way much earlier than the billed start time of the evening concert with Cam, Brett and Keith, and as a result we found out too late that some other acts I would love to have seen, including Fairground Saints and Lainey Wilson, had played on smaller stages around the O2 earlier in the afternoon. Had we known, we could easily have got there in time to see them.

I have the eye of a magpie, I freely admit it, and as soon as we arrived at the O2 I was drawn in to the Town Square tent, where everything Western, from distressed cowboy hats to funky cactus earrings to woven Navajo jackets, was on sale – everything designed to appeal to the Calamity Jane in me. But we had to press on, to meet friends inside and take our seats in the main O2 concert venue.

Those seats turned out to be in the very highest part (bar one row) of the gods, and having clambered up the steep steps and teetered along the row to reach them, all the while trying not to topple over, I felt relieved to be there at last as I endeavoured to acclimatise myself to the vertiginous view of the stage way in the distance.

Once Cam came on stage, all was forgotten in the joy of finally being at the C2C in the presence of some of my favourite country artists.

But I couldn’t forget the trinkets of Town Square…

All through the next three performances – a singer on the secondary stage in the big venue, who did a sterling version of ‘Shallow’ from the Lady Gaga version of A Star is Born, then Brett Eldredge, who sang a very moving song about his grandmother having Alzheimer's, and then, again on the smaller stage, Runaway June, whom I enjoyed a lot – I kept thinking about the lovely leather and silver watch I’d seen, and wondering how much it was and whether it would still be there if I snuck back.

So as Brett disappeared off stage, I made the fateful decision: to teeter back down the steps in the interval before Keith came on, and go and have another look at the gorgeous goodies.

Down and down and down various flights of stairs I went, both inside the venue and in the outer hall, until I finally came to the security guards at the main entrance, who took no notice of me as I went through the scanner machines and into the area of restaurants and bars. From there I went outside into the cold evening, and there, to my disappointment, I saw that the entrance to Town Square was boarded up for the night. Bummer! I wouldn’t be getting that watch after all, as we were driving back to the south of France the next day.

So I went back inside, and thought I’d first go and see what music events were happening in the Blue Room venue while I was in the restaurant area. It was there that I made the awful discovery: not only was the Blue Room now closed for the night too, but I would only have been able to access it from inside the O2 concert venue, which, now that I’d come out of it, I wouldn’t be allowed back into.

So I wouldn’t be seeing Keith Urban either.

It was a shattering blow, and I felt utterly stupid and shallow, having been lured out merely by the prospect of looking at more Western-themed baubles. So I wandered into Starbucks, bought a cappuccino, and settled down to write a blog to pass the time and try to feel less glum. Even that wasn’t plain sailing, as no sooner had I sat down than a buxom young woman plonked herself next to me on the pretext of charging her phone using the socket under the seat there, but really just to keep asking me over and over whether I thought the O2 didn’t have many acts on in August because people were away on their holidays. There’s only so many times you can say ‘Probably, but there are also a lot of music festivals on then as well’ without sounding as much like a stuck needle as she did.

Anyway, when Carol came out of the concert at long last, I wanted her to say that Keith hadn’t been anything special. But she couldn’t lie – he had been brilliant and a consummate professional, and I had missed a spectacular performance. All for the sake of having another look at a few trinkets that I probably wouldn’t have bought anyway.

Lesson learned? Probably not…

​But should Keith Urban himself ever stumble across this, I’d just like to say how gutted I am that I didn’t get to see you, and how, since that night of abject failure on my part, I have promised myself that one day I most definitely WILL!

Oh, the creative things we’ve been getting up to here on the French Riviera! Not all have quite worked out as envisaged, but we’ve had a brilliant time trying out ideas and seeing which ones fly. Speaking of flying, Carol’s trying out this thing called levitation photography (not quite as ouija board-ish as it sounds, but the results can look spectacular), and that was where the camper van’s high roof came in handy. Actually getting onto the roof was no mean feat, and involved scrabbling across from the villa’s first-floor balcony, and then hanging on for dear life as the van was manoeuvred into a good position for the shot. My beloved guitar didn’t have any say as to her involvement in the precarious arrangement, but we both lived to tell the tale. As to the final shot – well, after all that daredevilry, it turned out that the van’s roof wasn’t ideal after all, so we’re now back on the quest for the perfect spot for a bit of glorious levitation… For now, this one of me holding on to my guitar while nervously sprawling atop Tanya Toyota will have to suffice…
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It’s been a very steep and winding learning curve, involving a variety of USB and XLR microphones, numerous jack plugs of various sizes and configurations, two different portable multitrack recording devices and much frayed patience, but I finally figured out that the problem wasn’t with any of the equipment, it was simply that if you’re going to record with a condenser mic, you need to power it with its own 48V phantom power supply. Eureka!!! Or perhaps Duh!!!

Anyway, I then set about buying one online. That, however, was where the problems really kicked into gear.

I thought that it was a wise move buying one from an eBay supplier in Nice, given that Nice is only a 30-minute drive away from where we’re staying. How could I have been so naïve? I ordered it on 13 January, and today, 30 January, after being assured it would arrive on 22 January (even that seemed a long time, given that it was only coming from Nice), and after numerous shirty emails to the supplier, I gave up the ghost (so to speak) and we drove to a music shop near Cannes to buy a phantom power supply there instead. Actually, we first drove there on Monday, only to discover that, in that peculiarly French tradition, it was closed all day Monday. So we drove there again today, only to be told they’d sold the last one a few days ago. So, after a spot of vicarious retail therapy (vicarious in that for a change I didn't actually buy anything and Carol did) to calm my severely re-fraying nerves, we drove home, where we discovered – yes!!! – a package in the mailbox from the eBay supplier in Nice! Hooray, hoorah!!! I could finally get on with recording ‘Don’t Wanna Run’ for the video Carol and I are planning on making! So I happily tore open the package, to find inside… a universal travel adaptor and no hint of a 48V phantom power supply…

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!!

After yet another VERY shirty email to the eBay supplier, I had to go and lie down on the sofa with the dogs for a while.

My hopes now hang on a friend who’s visiting from the UK bringing one over that we’ve just ordered on Amazon Prime to be – apparently – delivered to her tomorrow (Thursday). She travels on Friday, so if it doesn’t arrive with her tomorrow, the never-ending saga of the elusive 48V phantom power supply will continue to be exactly that…

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, at least I got to pretend to drive a pink Chevy around the music store! Maybe there’s a song in that…
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Today we decided to take the train to Nice in order to visit the Musée Matisse – a lovely cultural pursuit, involving, we assumed, a quick hop on the train along the coast, followed by a ride on the bus that leaves from the station and drops you off right outside the museum, then a leisurely stroll around the two floors containing the paintings and sculptures of the French master…

Wrong!! We did do all of that, but at each step we also tested to the full the saying that seems to apply the world over: if something can go wrong, it will. Sod’s law. Murphy’s law. Or, as the French have it, le loi de l’emmerdement maximum…

Everything was perfectly on track for a smooth day out … until we arrived at Mouans-Sartoux railway station to find that we’d missed the train to Nice by two minutes and the next one wasn’t due for another fifty-eight. But ça ne fait rien – we strolled into the little town and had a coffee and took photos to while away the time. I made a quick visit to les toilettes before we headed back to the station – and found myself momentarily plunged into darkness at a crucial moment when someone tried the handle on the locked door and managed to flip the light switch to the cubicle at the same time. Sacré bleu!

After being greeted by effuse apologies in French from the man waiting outside the loo when I came out, and stuttering back something like, ‘C’etait noir – but it’s OK!’ I rejoined Carol and we headed back to the station to catch the one o’clock train to Nice.

It was when we arrived at Nice’s central station an hour or so later, by which time it was Carol who was now bursting for the loo, that things started to go decidedly en forme d’une poire. Discovering that you had to pay an exorbitant 80 cents to use the station toilets, and having no loose change, we dashed around the little shop opposite, buying enough snacks to generate sufficient change for both of us to make use of the facilities. By then Carol could wait no longer, so dropped her one-euro coin in the machine by the gate, retrieved her 20 cents change, and bustled through the turnstile. It didn’t budge.

‘ATTENDEZ! ATTENDEZ!’ yelled the attendant, previously barely noticeable from her seated position around the corner.

That was one ‘ATTENDEZ!’ too many for Carol by that desperate stage.

‘I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH, AND THERE’S NO NEED TO SHOUT!!’ she yelled back (not entirely truthfully, it has to be said, though I wasn’t about to point that out to her by then). At which the officious attendant jabbed her finger at the turnstile, as though giving Carol the go-ahead to give it another push. Which she did, with furious vigour, and then duly marched round to the right, still fuming about having been yelled at by the attendant… only to find herself facing a bemused and worried-looking Frenchman, who, having just heard her say she didn’t speak French, stammered ‘Weemen’s’ while pointing to the other end of the room, where a woman was coming out of one of the cubicles.

Wheeling round, Carol then marched across to the Ladies’, flung open a door showing green for vacant, and found herself staring at an elderly woman hunched over the toilet with her knickers round her knees…

‘This is not going well!’ she muttered, perhaps the understatement of the day, but it brought a smile to the woman who had previously come out of the other cubicle and was now washing her hands.

I uttered not a word, though a phrase we had read the day before in a book of French idioms was dancing around in my head: Comme un éléphant dans un magasin de porcelaine…

By the time we were crossing the station concourse to catch the bus to the Matisse Museum, we were both gripped by lavatorial humour in its most literal sense, with tears rolling down our cheeks as we relived the disastrous few minutes in the station loo. Not to mention expensive – it cost the two of us nearly two pounds to use those facilities!

It may have been the uncontrollable mirth that we were both experiencing, or, again, it may have simply been the loi de l’emmerdement maximum still exerting its powerful force, but we spent a few seconds too long deciding which one of the two parallel roads we needed to be on to catch the bus, and it came rattling along on the one we had decided against, with no time for us to run to catch it, resulting in a 30-minute wait for the next one.

By now we’d wasted 90 precious minutes of our day out just hanging around waiting for public transport – but we’d also had a fair amount of hilarity, so we shrugged our shoulders in a pseudo-Gallic way and ate our newly purchased snacks as we waited on the pavement for the next bus to come along.

And come along it did, on time, 30 minutes later. All went well until we got off at the museum stop and turned the wrong way, resulting in a very long-winded and cold walk through a park and nearly into the wrong museum before we got back on track and realised that had we turned right instead of left off the bus, we’d have been in the museum within a couple of minutes.

After a bit of confusion about which was the entrance and which the exit, we at last made it into the Matisse Museum – with, surprisingly, enough time still left to stroll around and take in all the markedly different phases of the French artist’s career and life, and for Carol to take photos aplenty (sans flash, as the rather too attentive attendant repeatedly told her in quite an unnecessarily flirtatious way, I thought), as well as nearly demolish Marguerite’s head, an undoubtedly priceless sculpture that rocked to and fro as, with her camera to her eye, she backed into its rather flimsy plinth. No alarm sounded, and no security guards came rushing to poor Marguerite’s aid – not even the overly attentive one on the door! We didn’t linger too long after that, however, not wanting to push our already overstretched luck, and walked in a much more direct route to the bus stop on the opposite side of the road to catch the bus back to the station. Only to find that – of course! – we’d missed it by minutes. So we made a snap decision to catch the next bus that came along, wherever it went. The one that came next was heading to the port, so we took that, not realising that before it got to the port it would go everywhere else in Nice it was possible to go (except, of course, the station). When we finally got to the port, we all dutifully disembarked. Or tried to. It was when the elderly lady in front of Carol started flailing her stick around wildly as she tried to get off that I knew the next thing that could go wrong was about to. The old lady teetered over, nearly taking Carol’s eye out with her stick as she did so, and, like a woodlouse on its back, rolled around on the floor of the bus while everyone around her gasped and tried to get her back up before she was ready to be got up. ‘Je vais bien, je vais bien!’ she kept saying as the bus driver rushed up the aisle to assist her too. All was well in the end – she was probably more embarrassed than hurt, poor thing – and we all piled off onto the pavement as the bus drove off.

We definitely needed a swift glass of vino by then, which we had at a nearby bar, and then set off once more for the station, the Google Maps app directing us every step of the way… until the phone suddenly died and we were left wandering around in the centre of Nice with not a clue as to where the station was…

All we could do was keep walking in the direction we’d been heading in when the phone gave out, and thankfully that did indeed lead to the main road from where we could see the station. In no mood to mess around any longer, and seeing no barrier to just walking through the turnstile and onto the platform, that’s exactly what we did. Naughty us. But from the rest of the day’s experience, we should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. As our train came sailing in, a station gendarme came up to me and asked, in French, to see our tickets. Now it was my turn to deny any knowledge of the French language… At which he merely switched to English, which I couldn’t really claim to have no knowledge of. That’s where, thankfully, it helped that Carol had a ticket app on her phone, so we could legitimately claim that we were about to buy tickets on the app but were waiting until we were on the train and could plug in as she only had 9 per cent power left. Phew!

​The train was packed, but we eventually found seats, plugged the phone in, bought the tickets, and settled back for the ride home… and managed to forget that French stations are VERY sparsely signed, so unless you’ve counted the stops or know the route extremely well, it’s very easy to miss your stop, especially in the dark, which it was by then, and which we very nearly did. But not quite. We got off, and found ourselves laughing hysterically as we made our way up the hill and home while talking about the day we’d just had – the day when virtually everything that could have gone wrong … did!

How I imagined summer in St Tropez to be: convivial yacht parties, scorching sun, and the expectation that if you're there, you have a lot of money. How I discovered winter in St Tropez to be: lonesome shrouded empty yachts, persistent rain, and the expectation that if you're there, you have a lot of money...

We'd decided to take the coast road there from Cannes, thinking it'd be a quick and pleasant sea-lapped run, only to discover that the mountains come very close to the shore in this part of the Mediterranean, and most of the time we were rounding sharp bends high above the slightly foggy coastline. Not only was in winter, it was also Sunday, so we pretty much had the road, as well as the little places we drove through, to ourselves. Such a vast contrast to the seething hordes of sun-seekers who must flock there in the warmer months, but still appealing in its own way.

By the time we finally arrived in St Tropez, the light was fading, yet finding somewhere to park was still a problem, and the rain was still coming down, making our attempted walk with the dogs from the centre of town to the waterfront a brief and curtailed venture. A small coffee and an equally small beer in the cafe directly opposite the parking spot where were were finally able to dump the van turned out to cost more than we had left in change, so out came the trusty credit card. The coffee alone cost 5 euros and 40 cents - steeper even than London prices!

Having shelled out for such overpriced drinks, we decided to take the non-toll roads back to Mouans-Sartoux, imagining them to be as easy to navigate as the miles and miles of dead-straight rural roads we'd encountered in northern France. How wrong could we have been? After climbing and descending two mountains in the dead of night, shrouded in fog and with steep drops on either side of the narrow, twisting road, I've never been so relieved to see civilization again, or to knock back a stiff brandy or two when we eventually arrived home late in the evening.

I know I said I'd be writing about my attempts to break into the live music scene here on the Riviera, but what I'm discovering is that, for my kind of music at least, such a scene doesn't really seem to exist in southern France. Disappointing definitely, but it hasn't stopped me continuing to hope that something along those lines may yet present itself...