Dearest Family and Friends,

In the last month or so since my most recent ChaliGram, we've sailed from the Italian island of Elba to our absolutely most FAVORITE mainland Italian destination: Savona! We discovered Savona last year. It's on the Italian Riviera-West, about 15 miles west-southwest of Genoa, way at the top of the Ligurian Sea. The situation of the darsena vecchia (old port) is just SO CONVENIENT to everything, and the harbour management is SO FRIENDLY and helpful! And although the town got bombed by the Allies during WWII, we left SOME beautiful medieval buildings still standing. The good news and the bad news is that the once totally commercial and industrial harbour has been replaced by a Cruise Ship quay, a pleasure boat marina, apartments, hotels, shops and restaurants. Think of a miniature Baltimore inner harbour. The loss of jobs has taken its toll for sure on the local economy though. Very few visiting yachts find their way into Savona. And to top it off, it's inexpensive. What a winning combination! While in Savona, Chuck and I celebrate 3 anniversaries. 35th Wedding Anniversary on July 22nd; 38th anniversary since our First Date on July 24th and 38th Anniversary of our 2nd/"ZAP" Date, when, as Chuck puts it, the hook was set! :-) We had lots of restaurant dates that week!

After spending 13 days in Savona, we reluctantly started heading southwest towards France. We had to stay in Italy until we knew the status of our new sail, due to arrive in Menton, France from Hong Kong. Once we left Italy, we would be without the internet/email for a little while. Fortunately, we could stay in San Remo, Italy which is only about 12 miles from Menton. Sure enough, we got the call and so dashed into Menton on Monday, August 5. For the next 9 days, we had a social whirl! We hadn't been so socially active since our days in our winter marina in Marina di Ragusa, Sicily. My old college buddy Anna -- who I found on Facebook after 35 years! -- and her husband Klaus live in Luxembourg, but just bought a vacation home in Menton…. and they were there on vacation! We had a great time, eating together, shopping together, doing laundry together! Having some 1:1 girl time was a special treat for me. In the meantime, Chuck and Klaus manhandled the new sail onto ChaliVentures and got her all installed and ready to go. It passed the first test: it FIT! Schweh! Besides Anna and Klaus, we spent several evenings with Kate, a French fellow live-aboard we met in Menton 2 years ago. While we were anchored in Elba a few weeks earlier Kate and Patrick with their son Robin and dog, Bond surprised us one morning when they knocked on our boat. Imagine being in the same anchorage!! Once they returned to Menton, Patrick and Rob went to visit family and friends, so Kate was on her own. She dined with us onboard a couple of times, and she and I ALSO had 1:1 girl time by attending a piano recital by Igor Tchetuev, who played Chopin and Liszt. He had recently won the Arthur Rubenstein piano competition, so I was psyched. How lucky that we were in Menton during its annual Music Festival; something was going on every night. The venue for this recital was the Cocteau Museum.

Again…. as always, we reluctantly left Menton. But the forecast was for some sporty northeast winds, and we wanted to actually SAIL for a change and try out our new Yankee sail. HOOOOORAYYYYYY!!!! YIPPPPEEEEE!!!!! IT WORKS!! IT WORKS!! Finally a functioning foresail again. At one point we were flying along at 7.5 knots! (That's fast for our kind of boat.) Chuck is happy for maybe the first time this year. He'd been kicking himself for months for having our big genoa modified, which resulted in a 1/3 functional sail. Now we're back in business again.

We are now in another one of our favorite towns: Cannes. Between Monaco and St. Tropez, the coastline is littered with super yachts, mega yachts and now, what can only be described as GIGA yachts. As such, the skies are also full of helicopters which carry their billionaire owners to and from their floating palaces. I mean, seriously, they look like small ocean liners/cruise ships. But, here in the Cannes old port, although there are VERY LARGE motor yachts along the outside quays (perhaps "only" 150-175 feet long--the megayachts don't fit into most harbours), we are amongst normal sailboats and paying ironically modest marina fees. The old port faces the Hotel del Ville (City Hall); we are on the west side of the Casino and the venue of the Cannes Film Festival. We tend to walk in the old part of town rather than the new "Shi-Shi" part. Old Cannes has wonderful pedestrian streets with all sorts of food shops, clothes and shoe shops and you-name-it shops, and of course a zillion restaurants. Weekends feature a flea market, which, being Cannes, has some VERY NICE items. If only I could safely bring back one of those gorgeous sets of porcelain dinner ware! *sigh* In the meantime, I just hung out my laundry on the line I wrap around the rigging. Glamourous, hunh? NOT!!!

So, we're happy ….. still and again.

OK, so here's the latest BIG DECISION from the crew of ChaliVentures. After living with our decision for 2 months to truck our boat to Germany in September, enabling us to cruise in the Baltic Sea next year……. we changed our minds. Aint gonna do it! Chuck and I got increasingly discouraged from reading not 1, not 2, but 5 blogs written by different cruisers in the Baltic. The frequent rain and the colder temps kept hitting us like a sledgehammer; and in July and August, it seems like the Denmark/Sweden/Norway area of the Baltic is so crowded it makes the Cote d'Azur look like a wilderness (well….perhaps a slight exaggeration). Anyway, when it came time to pay the trucking company, we decided that the rather sizeable investment required to prepare the boat and to transport the boat just didn't make sense if we were both feeling only "indifferent" to the whole idea. So! C'est ça! ChaliVentures will spend this winter on the hard (she needs to dry out after being in the water for the last 2 winters) in Gruissan, France where there is a highly recommended, very reasonably priced boatyard run by very friendly and English-speaking people. Gruissan is a nice little town with good access to trains. We have about 5 weeks until we need to get there, which will allow us to take our time and spend as much time as we can afford in our favorite towns along this coast.

Zoey's still thriving. She flirts mercilessly with any and all human beings. She TOO likes being in a marina after being at anchor, although the longer walks on land tend to wear her out. While we were visiting Anna and Klaus, their 3 year old grandson Sasha was there also. OH BOY!!! I'm not sure who was more excited, Zoey or Sasha! While we were eating dinner, Zoey DID manage to find the softest spot in the apartment, which she could access: Sasha's mattress on the floor. We found her snoozing away….

So, it's about time for me to make dinner now. TaTa, and hope you're enjoying the end of August.

PHOTOS:
https://picasaweb.google.com/chaliventures/ChaliGram134BellaItaliaELaBelleFrance?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCLPr0te9vqLOQQ&feat=directlink

Love, Alison, Chuck and tired old Zoey