Day 3, it has to be said, was a lot more successful than the day before. Having tried to find accommodation in Geneva for several hours and consulting the fountain of all travel knowledge (Dad) we discovered there was no accommodation available at all in Geneva or the surrounding area. Back to the drawing board!

We decided that the best thing to do was to change our plans and go to Milan first instead. Now we are going to Milan for one night on Saturday (7th) then Interlaken on Sunday until Wednesday and then to Venice on Thursday. Unfortunately it looks like we will have to do the rest of Switzerland another time. Luckily we managed to get a refund on our Geneva tickets but this experience has certainly taught us that we need to be flexible.

After sorting that out we went to Monaco, another playground of the rich and famous. Even the station was extravagent!

Prince Rainier’s ship steals the show in the harbour with its own helipad and four decks complete with a Ferrari parked next to the dock. I wonder what he’ddo if someone parked a bigger yacht than his in the harbour!

We climbed the steps (they seem to like steps here) up to the palace and aquarium, both very interesting although one had more fish than the other.

Back up the other side of the steep cove of Monaco up to the casino. It is now free to enter the casino but not the gambling rooms – not for peasants like us anyway. The entrance hall is unbelievable and looked like the inside of a palace – very James Bond!

The 3 Ferarris, an Aston Martin and a Bently parked outside give an impression of the ridiculous wealth in this place.

A bit more walking around and we returned to Nice for another good night’s sleep.

The beginning of our second day was a bit of a disaster. We caught the bus to the bus station hoping to proceed on our day trip to Eze and Monaco. This journey itself was an experience. The driver appeared to act surprised at every manoeuvre he had to make – jolted braking and swerved corners.]

Almost an hour later we arrived at the bus station – it seems that the improvements the city is making to its public transport is having an adverse effect on the transport for the rest of the city.

Anyway, another hour of waiting at the bus station and they finally announced that the bus wasn’t coming due to the traffic. By now the day was wearing on so we decided to go to Cannes by train instead.

Whilst at the station we tried to book our train journey to Geneva (as you have to for long-distance TGV services in France) only to find that they were all booked until Saturday afternoon – a precious day and a half later than planned. Of course we had no choice but to take this but it left us with the problem of accommodation for Friday night.

Anyway, off to Cannes we went and a much nicer city than Nice it is. You can really see why the rich and famous want to come here with the beautiful beach, chic boutiques and of course the various arts festivals (of which the film festival is one). We spent most of our time in Cannes walking around and soaking up the atmosphere. The weather was lovely even though the wind nearly blew us away.

We decided to see if we could stay in Cannes on Friday as we thought it was so nice. Just by luck the information centre found us a hotel as cheap as a hostel so we are now all set for Friday.

A short journey back to Nice, a but of a wander around, and another ice cream and then we went back to the hostel.

Our journey starts with the French Riviera town of Nice. A short flight from Birmingham and a surprisingly simple bus journey from the airport led us to our hostel, Ville Saint Exupery, in an old monastry up in the hills above the city. Although a bit of a trek the facilities are excellent and according to our room mates are some of the best in Europe. The staff are very friendly and everyone here seems to be either American, Australian or English which may ruin some of the French charm but also makes things easier for us, backpacking beginners as we are.

Once we’d dumped our bags we hopped on the bus back down to the city. The public transport here is good (by English standards) and appears to be in the process of being supplemented by quite an extensive tram system being built across the city.

Our first port of call was… well, the port actually (!) with the usual array of expensive and extravagent sea vessels of all kinds. A quick ice cream later (it had to be done) and we climbed the excessive number of steps up to the old castle ruins and great views of the city in both the port and the old town/beach directions. Descending from the cliff gave us good views of the bright blue sea and rather ugly pebble beach, full of tourists of course! The old town of Nice is a warren of streets centred around the flower market (of course another tourist attraction) which makes way for a large number of restaurants in the evening. We ate pizza here and then wandered around a bit longer before the long journey back to the hostel. A good night’s sleep is what we want now ready for our trip to Monaco and the mountain village of Eze.

From 9rules.com.

Although it looks like I haven’t done anything for a while, I have in fact been quite busy. I’ve fixed a few CSS bugs I found in Internet Explorer 7, particularly on the photos pages. It seems that IE7 really isn’t that much more standards compliant than IE6 (a discussion point for another time) – surprise surprise Microsoft! Behind the scenes I’ve also been working on the commenting system for photos. It’s taking longer than I’d hoped, probably because I’m a perfectionist! I want the comment system to work in a similar way to the Wordpress system as that just makes sense to me. The Gallery comments module on the other hand has different ideas so I’m going to have to rewrite it somewhat to bend it to my will.

In other news, I’ve got a job! From September (after I’ve graduated and been slumming it around Europe for a bit) I’ll be working for a small company called Protec Innovations Ltd as a Web Application Developer. Currently lots of the details are still in discussion but I’ll post more info when I get it.

It’s time to celebrate! You can now download the full-size versions of photos. This feature is useful for anyone that wants to print the photos at any decent quality. One problem with Facebook (which a lot of my friends use to share photos) is that although you can save the photos on it, if you try and print them, they look crap. If you’re really interested then go and try it for yourself. Everyone else just take my word for it!

Time for an update I think. I’ve been working hard on getting things a bit more how I want them and particularly on the photos section. I’ve uploaded and partially set up my theme for Wordpress, it is not finished yet but I think the site is pretty much still usable and the bits that do not work properly will be fixed soon.

The photos section is now looking pretty good and has basic functionality, you still can’t comment on photos or download the full-size versions but I’ll do that soon. To celebrate I’ve added an album of photos from New Year. Don’t worry I’ll be adding some more soon. In fact that’s the next thing on my todo list.

Just a few other points. You may notice that the menu at the top looks a bit odd. That’s because it’s not finished yet and as I add the other sections of the site it’ll start to look a bit more normal. Also there’s the ‘Weekly Artists’ section on the front page sidebar, which is thanks to another plug-in for Wordpress called Scrobbler. This uses a clever bit of AJAX to pull the information from a feed on my Last.fm page and stick on my site. Lovely!

So, where to begin? Well the first thing to do is obviously to get Wordpress and Gallery 2 all set up and installed. Clearly the Wordpress installation went OK otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. I will be integrating Gallery 2 into Wordpress to make the whole thing look like one site with the help of the rather useful and aptly named WPG2 (Wordpress Gallery 2) plug-in.

After installing Gallery 2 and downloading the required plug-ins for WPG2 to work (really easy to do with Gallery’s awesome plug-in manager) and some mod-rewrite magic, the path /photos now points to my embedded galleries. Time for another coffee…

Those of you with eyes may have noticed that things have changed just a little bit around here. Don’t worry all the content and photos that were here before will be back soon and the site will be bigger and better than before. I finally swallowed my pride and decided to use pre-built software for my site as I’m never going to be able to provide the features that a fully fledged CMS can. Instead I will be building this site with a combination of Wordpress and Gallery 2 and recording the journey as I go along. Watch this space…