Casinos, Yachts, and Princess Grace - Can You Guess Where We Are?

We took the train from Villefranche to Monaco for the day. Monaco was not my favorite stop on our trip, but I’m glad we went once. It was very commercialized and expensive. However, it was very pretty. We first walked from the train station down to the harbor to look at all of the fancy boats.

Here is TMT with some of the big boats.


Monaco is built on a mountain, so we headed up the hill to see the casino. This is a park right across from the casino. TMT took this picture, and he’s pretty proud of it!

This is the Monte-Carlo casino. It has a very strict dress code, which we definitely did not meet, so this is all we saw of it!

Il Terrazzino – With this restaurant recommendation, the Amateur Gourmet completely redeemed himself. He rates this as the best meal he’s ever eaten, and while I might not go that far, it was excellent. This was really the main reason for our little day trip to Monaco. We got a fixed price menu with the pasta of the day. There was a slight misunderstanding here – when the Amateur Gourmet ate here, he got multiple items with each course. That’s what we thought we were getting. However, what we ordered ended up only including one item per course. So, I was a little disappointed, but the food was still great!

We started with an appetizer of bruschetta. This was probably the best bruschetta I’ve ever eaten. The tomatoes were wonderful – even better than Arkansas tomatoes – and the olive oil and bread were excellent too.

Our next course was this antipasti platter. It also was excellent; I would like to learn to make vegetables like they did at Il Terrazzino. I can’t even name most of what’s on this plate, but I know there was cabbage and carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, and fresh ricotta cheese, along with a slice of frittata.

This penne with tomato cream sauce was also very good. Although it was pretty basic, I loved it because I could identify it! This is where the biggest disappointment (and most embarrassing moment of the meal) came into play. They serve you from a large family-style platter. As he was putting pasta on my plate, I told him to stop at the point you see above because “I wanted to save room for all of the other choices” I knew were coming. However, this ended up being it for the main course. I’m sure the waiter was thinking “What is this crazy American girl talking about?” We didn’t figure it out until they came to clear our plates and didn’t bring any more pasta choices!

To get over our disappointment about the lack of pasta choices, we ordered a cheese plate, including a blue cheese, a cheese called cavallo, and Parmesan. Our favorite was the cavallo, which is the one at the top of the plate.

Here we are sitting at our table at the restaurant. Isn’t it colorful?! After lunch, we headed back to Villefranche to collect our luggage and then go back to the train station to catch our train to Milan, via Nice.

Here is TMT on the train ride that ended up being the worst train ride on our entire trip! The Nice train station had no food, except for some suspicious-looking sandwiches. Due to the lack of refrigeration, I opted to skip the sandwich, thinking I’d get something on the train. When we got on the train, we were squished in – every seat was full. The electricity in our train car kept going out, so we rode for large portions of the trip with no lights and no air conditioning. Eventually, the train man came back through and told us that we needed to move to another train car. We were supposed to do this in the dark. Let’s just say that it was quite an ordeal to gather up our luggage from the rack in the middle of the car, and all of the stuff we’d scattered all over our seating area, and then move through several train cars in the dark! Also, the train somehow got delayed by over an hour. We never thought we’d be so glad to arrive in Milan for our five hours of sleep!