Our boat trip continues. Today we are calling into the harbour of
Beaulieu-sur-Mer - a beautiful town along the coast and not far from Nice.
Just before the port is
La Réserve de Beaulieu - a 4-star hotel known as the 'pink palace' and one of the 'Leading Small Hotels of the World.' Click on the link to read more and to take a virtual tour.
The hotel's history dates back to the times of the Belle Epoque. It was founded in 1880 by Pierre Lottier, a restaurant owner from Nice. Originally a luxury seafood restaurant - 'La Reserve' was the nickname given to the live fish tank which Pierre Lottier had dug out in order to stock the local fishermen’s catch.
In 1905, La Réserve de Beaulieu added some ten prestigious rooms after which aristocrats, captains of industry and artists used to meet up : King Gustave V of Sweden, King Leopold II of Belgium, Leo Tolstoy, Sir Thomas Lipton, Gustave Eiffel and Mistinguet. The American press magnate and sports lover Gordon Bennett Jr became a great habitué of La Reserve and promoted it in his newspaper, The New York Herald.
La Réserve lived through the Belle Epoque, the Great War and the Roaring Twenties and at the end of the Second World War, the new owners built a large Florentine style villa adjoining the restaurant’s veranda. The hotel's celebrity guest book from this period and the following years is a compendium of illustrious guests from the fifties and the age of glamour such as Rita Hayworth, Clark Gable, Paul Newman, Charlie Chaplin, or Edith Piaf, Jean Marais, Frank Sinatra.
The hotel's current owners are Nicole and Jean-Claude Delion who continue the tradition of the 'pink palace' on the Côte d’Azur.
Yesterday the Palace announced that Prince Albert II is engaged to his long-term girl-friend, the South African Olympic swimmer, Charlene Wittstock. After months of speculation, everyone in the Principality is delighted.
Our boat trip continues. Today we are calling into the harbour of Beaulieu-sur-Mer - a beautiful town along the coast and not far from Nice.
Beaulieu-sur-Mer - just along the coast from Monaco on the way to Nice.
Another snippet of life in Monaco - a waiter on the terrace of the Café de Paris. 
It's early morning and the moon still hangs over the palms and the sculpture in front of the Grimaldi Forum on Avenue Princesse Grace. 
Strelitzia - the Bird of Paradise plant. This one is Strelitzia Alba and you'll pass it if you walk along Avenue Princesse Grace. Monaco has so many beautiful trees and shrubs - not only in their public gardens but in the streets as well. 
These photos were taken in the morning so I imagine by the evening the place would have been jammed with fans. As it was, they all seemed to know each other with a great camaradie going on and much looking at celebrity magazines to see who might possibly arrive. Every now and again, word would go around that so-and-so had been seen in a car and the group would move to a better vantage point but when I was there no-one did arrive.
There's a lot of red carpet in town at the moment. The Grimaldi Forum is the venue for four days of the television festival. 
