Monte Carlo, Monaco, August 7

Today we say good bye to our ship that has been home for the last 15 days and hello to a hotel for the next 2.

The Monte Carol harbour is filled with yachts, yachts and more yachts – these are BIG boats. I’m pretty sure these aren’t even the really big ones and that they use a harbour elsewhere. It’s becoming pretty typical to find these kinds of boats in the harbours each time we visit one.

Although we are some of the last off of the boat as we don’t have a flight to catch we are still off and at our hotel before 10. We are staying at the Fairmont here. It’s a pretty spectacular place and although we are here well before check-in we get a room right away. After checking out the hotel and its roof-top pool we head out for a bit of lunch.

On the way back from lunch we wander over to ‘the’ casino. This is the one Casino Royale was filmed in – we don’t see 007 anywhere this time. Conveniently the casino is right next to out hotel. The building inside and out is beautiful (pic). At this point we don’t get too far inside as there is a 10 euro fee to enter areas other than the slots and men need a jacket and tie. We also thought you needed your passport, but a driver’s licence apparently is good enough.

On the way back to our room we also check out our hotel’s casino – not too much action in the afternoon, but no entrance fee.

In the evening after a late diner Chris suits up (with a jacket and tie) and we head back to the Casino Royale casino. This turns out to be a huge disappointment as I mentioned in the last blog post. We end up spending some time in the casino in our hotel at the end of it all – Chris playing craps. This is pretty interesting with French flying around and some pretty big rollers. I’m pretty sure they don’t pump oxygen in here like in Las Vegas as I get very sleepy and head to bed before Chris. One nice thing about Monte Carlo casinos is that they are non-smoking.