Well that was close! My Madison flight was late coming into Detroit. I made my connection to Amsterdam, but just barely (I was among the last to board). You will know by the end of this post whether my suitcase was equally lucky.
The overseas flight was so easy and smooth - I should have slept some, but I didn't. I watched a horrible 2025 movie with Emma Thompson (Dead of Winter), where one person after the next was bleeding to death or worse (yes, worse!), then turned off the screen and read a very sad and disturbing book about a marriage breaking up (Belle Burden's Strangers). It was compelling enough that it did not make me sleepy. I made the mistake of breaking my abstinence from alcohol and drank a glass of wine hoping it would leave me dozing off but it did nothing of the sort. All the spinning thoughts in my head from the last two nights are still there. Add to them being in an airplane, the wine, the horrible movie and the compelling book and you have yourself a case of total insomnia.
But, here I am in Amsterdam and much as I think the timing of this trip is so wrong, nonetheless, the airport has a long and sweet history for me -- from my first solo trip abroad (when I was just 18, traveling to the U.S. to be a nanny), to years of making connections here on my way to... well, everywhere!
Breakfast? Back to pain au chocolat!
I'm going to France, but not Paris immediately. My first stop is to be St Paul de Vence -- a small place up in the hills, just to the west of Nice. It's a medieval village and it inspired such greats as Chagall, Picasso and Matisse. (Chagall lived his final years here and is buried in the local cemetery.) On my list of imperatives is a museum: the Fondation Maeght. More about that later. One other imperative is to walk the village streets and ramparts, and take in the Provence atmosphere in the off off season, but it looks like it will rain the whole two days I am to be there so I may be lowering my ambitions. I've been to this region many times and I swear that their motto here of 300 sunny days per year has failed me for more than 50% of the time. Just click on the link to Nice at the side of Ocean. You'll see lots of photos of... rain. Well, I brought my umbrella.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The village can easily be reached from Nice Airport. A taxi ride takes maybe 20 minutes.
I booked a hotel that looks lovely, with that open air layout that benefits from all the sunshine that streams to this region. (Except not on the days I'm here!) It's called the Villa St. Maxime. You can rent the whole thing because it is really small -- just five rooms. The architecture of the place is stunning -- no surprise, as it is the work of a great architect, Dominic Michaelis. You can read about it here, but let me just note that he is well known for his solar structures and residences that rely on renewable energy. Michaelis is a great believer in the power of waves, the sun and offshore platforms. You can quickly see how he would maybe not be on the same page as our current leadership. (According to the Economist, last year, wind and solar energy overtook fossil fuels in 2025 among countries of the EU, and coal mining fell dramatically on the continent. Having spent my first years in a house in Poland heated by coal, I know too well about coal pollution. I could hypothesize about its link to my prolonged coughing now every time I catch a virus.)
The above text? It is what was supposed to have happened. Madison to Detroit, Detroit to Amsterdam, Amsterdam to Nice, Nice to the Villa. Lovely dinner in a Provencal restaurant. Museum booked for tomorrow morning.
That is not what transpired.
Look where we are landing:
I know it's cloudy foggy rainy, but let me assure you, that is not Nice. That is Marseille. Maybe you heard? There was a plane crash at Nice Airport minutes before our landing. The landing gear of that plane did not open and they did a belly landing. They had sprayed the runway with foam. No one was hurt! Amazing and fantastic. But the airport is closed. So here we are, in Marseille.
It's a long drive to Nice from here and it's an even longer train ride. All those hills and cliffs! I wont get to St Paul de Vance tonight. I called the Sofitel in Marseille, because they are affiliated with my airline and I know I will get reimbursed for it. They had only three rooms available (why is Marseille so popular in January?) so I grabbed one. Here is my view. In the rain. Because it's also raining hard in Marseille. Wet but lovely.
You know how often I come to France, how much of it I have explored.I do believe this is the first time in my life when I have resorted to staying in a chain hotel. It feels remarkably like the Sofitel in Chicago. Am I even in France?
I am far from the restaurant circuit -- a bit of a walk and normally I would not shy away from it, but I am dead tired and it is raining and anyway, I'm not supposed to be in Marseille! Room service brings me a Mediterranean fish. They have no non-alcoholic beers or wines so wisely, I drink water.
All this time I have been working my phone nonstop. I am changing things around in February. Majorly! To accomplish this, I had to coordinate many moving pieces. More on this later. What really unnerved me tonight is that my email crashed. Completely. Nothing came in, nothing went out, just as I was rearranging my life and depending so much on confirmations via email. I worked for an hour troubleshooting. I Zoomed Ed. We worked together for another hour. It reminded me very much of our early life together when we would travel and the Internet would stop working. We would spend endless time trying to figure out why.
In the end he told me to call my email provider and I did and of course, the problem was theirs, not mine. I could have sang with joy. Not my problem! -- are my favorite words at the moment.
Right now I have to try hard to get some sleep.
Tomorrow, I hope to get to Nice. For one night in St Paul de Vance. Ridiculously short but there you have it.
with so much love...
