Monaco and Monte Carlo

Thursday 16 May 2019. We are onboard the Marella Dream cruise ship for the week and after leaving Majorca, we have a day at sea and then arrive in Monaco.

That disobedient butler of ours seems to have ignored my stern instruction not to play with my yacht and he's brought it all the way to meet us here in the harbour at Monte-Carlo! I shall have to have words...

Not only that but he's tagged onto a line of others that are being towed out for a day's sailing!

We realise that the Monaco Grand Prix is due to be staged in just ten days and preparations are well under way in order to turn the roads into a racetrack and any bit of open space into a grandstand.

Our way into the town is by walking along the pits lane, overlooking the main bit of track for the start and end of the race. It's too early for any cars to have arrived just yet, but teams are knocking about getting the row of pits sorted and the grandstands are already built up in tiers supported by miles and miles of scaffolding.

We make our way into the main area facing the famous casino by something of a zig-zag route. We made use of lifts and escalators at the railway station in order to climb upwards and then found that the park we were hoping to wander through down to the casino was covered in a huge construction of tiered seating. The photo shows the Cafe de Paris. We stopped for a small bottle of Sprite each, a snip at 8 euros each, but you should expect to pay more when your maitre d' shows you to a table in full dress suit (the maitre d', not the table...) In fact I felt distinctly under-dressed in t-shirt and slacks in this area where Aston Martins, Ferraris and Lamborghinis are the norm and you are not going to turn heads even in a nifty open-top Jag. I felt sure my Mazda 5 MPV might have raised an eyebrow or two though...

Not content with expensive mineral drinks, Miss Franny has me splashing out a fiver for an ice cream! This place is not for the faint of pocket. We were security wanded down just walking into a shopping arcade!

The casino is built onto the Opera House. We didn't go in. I'm not being tied naked into a wicker chair with no seat for anybody. We walked around to the back of the Opera House and found a collection of cars which had been gathered together for some event or other. It was nice to note that British cars made a strong contribution to the display.

We had a wander through the gardens with a great viewpoint over the harbour area, dominated by the Marella Dream.

We realised we must be over the tunnel that is such a feature of the Monaco Grand Prix and walked down to this spot which overlooks the exit from the tunnel.

A lift brought us down to the tunnel itself and I remember that the last time we were here in 1996 there was much work going on in the harbour at the tunnel exit that has now turned into shops, bars and restaurants, seen in the previous photo, along the edge of the harbour.

We descended yet again to the harbour level. Across the harbour is Monaco city, where the royal palace and cathedral can be found. The royal palace can be glimpsed towards the right hand side of the photo.

We returned to the ship and I spent 3 hours doing this from Tides Bar's windows, with a drink or two to while away the afternoon.

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Monte Carlo

7 August 2006. We leave Monaco Ville in the coach and have a short ride down the hill to Monte Carlo. Wait a moment... those are rather strange road markings! We are on the Grand Prix circuit! In a coach! More of that later. The coach leaves us in a coach park where we eventually find ourselves in gardens to the rear of the famous casino. We trotted round to the front to find yet more gardens. We only had an hour or so. Not really time to go in and win a fortune from some thin Sicilian gangster, whose beautiful companion would glare at him before swaying gracefully over to my side. In any case, this is a daytime excursion and I'm in a polo shirt and chinos - not the elegant attire necessary to draw eyes for reasons other than amusement... In 1873 a Yorkshire Mill engineer with a background in mechanics watched the wheels at Monte Carlo, analysing the results of every spin. He found that nine numbers kept coming up more than usual on one of the wheels. He won an astronomical amount for the day before the casino realised and moved the numbers on the wheel every night. After several days of winning that netted him the equivalent of 15 million UK pounds, he went on a two-day losing streak, finally admitting the inevitable and getting out with a remaining profit of 160,000 pounds - say, 10 or 11 millions in today's money. Joseph Jaggers died in 1892, the year that the song The Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo was written about him. My car was waiting across the road... Well, I can wish! Aston Martins litter the roads around here. I didn't see a single Reliant Robin all the time we were there. It was extremely hot. Miss Franny and I decided we would have an ice cream and having pulled some money from my pocket, I had to go digging again to pay for Fran's... You could buy an ice cream van for that sort of money where I come from... We had a walk up the hill opposite the casino, through exquisite gardens with intricate fountains, no doubt financed by the ice cream seller. It really was lovely there. Even with the sun so hot that 50 pence worth of ice cream was melting away every second... We got back on the coach and he drove around as much of the Formula One track as he could. Absolute rubbish - he made no attempt whatsoever to drive quickly... We all got off for a few minutes at the tunnel to take photos and then to gawp over the edge of the road where the cars come out into bright sunlight with the sea and harbour just a long drop to the left!

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The Principality of Monaco

Our excursion coach comes to Monaco and we climb out and climb on upwards, past the Oceanographic Museum of Jacques Cousteau to Monaco Ville - the old town up on it's promontary rock overlooking Monaco and Monte Carlo.

We come first to the Cathedral St Nicholas. This is the resting place of Grimaldi princes and princesses.

Inside the cathedral. There were fresh flowers on the graves of Prince Rainier and Princess Grace. Considerably more for ex-film star Grace Kelly in fact.

The Royal Palace of Monaco. Currently the home of Prince Albert II, the Sovereign Prince of Monaco.

Monaco is small and does not have an army of its own. The Royal Guard - the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince - are "borrowed" from France. Which at least ensures that it is extremely unlikely that Monaco would ever declare war on France...

Looking over the edge of the promontary in the opposite direction to Monte Carlo we see the ancient defences of Monaco. Whilst the chap in charge of the cannon asked which way to point it, the lookout fumbled for another 20p as the binoculars went dead...

Along this coast you see most of the old towns up on high steep hills. There were many pirates on the Mediterranean and it was easier to run into low lying towns for a spot of looting, rape and pillage than it was to run up a hill, grab a likely wench and then say "Hang on a minute love, I'm all out o' puff..." Also there's a limit to how high the cannon on a ship can point!

Looking down from Monaco Ville to Monte Carlo and the harbour.

The huge yacht in the centre is Lady Moura the yacht of Prince Albert.

The Constitution of Monaco had to be re-written a while ago. Whilst Prince Albert has two children, they were both born out of wedlock and cannot be heirs to the throne. He is now married to Princess Charlene, formerly Charlene Wittstock, a South African Olympic swimmer though no children have yet come from the marriage. The former Constitution stated that only direct children from the last prince could inherit the throne so there was a danger of there being no eligible heir. The Constitution now allows siblings who are direct descendants from the previous prince to inherit, so the current heir to the Grimaldi dynasty is Princess Caroline of Hanover, Albert's sister.

Ah... Princess Caroline... I fancied her from my early teens... She was easily the most beautiful of all the world's eligible princesses before Miss Franny came along and took me off the market! Had she ever popped into our local I might have been Prince Consort-in-Waiting by now...

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