Posts Tagged ‘monaco’

This year has been the best year for Formula One I have ever seen. Right from the start it has been an amazing season and Monaco always promises to be an interesting race.

It was great, though it’s hard to say it was extra special given the standard of racing has just been so high this year. In the end, it was a fairly comfortable victory for Mark Webber, though the real victory was that we saw virtually no interruption to racing – the safety car was out briefly at the start (when it doesn’t really matter) and then remained in for the rest of the race.

For the final stop of the road trip part of our holiday we headed to Monaco to win back the cost of our holiday in the Casino de Monte Carlo.

The hotel was reasonable – though facing onto a building site, perhaps explaining why it was half the price of all the other hotels in the area. The rooms we had next to each other shared a balcony also which was rather genius as it meant we could pop round to each other’s rooms.

It was very warm on an evening but luckily with myself and Norm living in Leeds city centre, simply leaving the balcony doors open all night wasn’t a problem as Monaco traffic, while noisy, pales in comparison to the drunken revelry that happens outside my window on a Saturday night.

One settled in we headed down towards the marina to get a few drinks at a local cafe followed by dinner at the Royal Thai restaurant which was excellent food.

Once it was dark we headed back to the hotel and donned suites to head up to the Casino de Monte Carlo. Meanwhile George decided to head to the local jazz bar to check out the karaoke and ended up spending the night chatting up the Scottish barmaid working there.

The casino was on the big square in Monte Carlo and was lined with needless expensive cars outside – Porches, Aston Martins, Mercades – even the Fiat was the limited edition rally version.

The casino was fantastically grand – something which I think just really rubs it in how much money they are winning from you. Even the bar was expensive in there and no wonder when you have three croupiers sitting on every table.

I was looking forward to doing some gambling but a €25 minimum bet on black jack we soon gave up on that and opted to play the slot machines instead. At least we did get to spend some time talking to some rather attractive young ladies on what is apparently called a Contiki tour. We’d never heard of it, probably a sign of how out of touch we were with the youth of today.

We were due to hit the road early the next morning but having agreed to be ready to go for 6:30, I headed out at 6:40, using our daily buffer of Kieran-Time to go take some shots of the marina before it got light.