Bill Sykes' Newsletter
from America.
(September 2005)
An ex-Brit gives his views - (without
fear or favor) - of the American Scene
Vacation
Travelogue:
Sheena and I left California on Wednesday the 14th of July for London
Heathrow and upon arrival transferred to London Gatwick where we spent the night
in a hotel before picking up a flight to Venice, Italy, in order to board a ship
for a twelve night Mediterranean cruise. This cruise would take us from Venice
to Barcelona, via Athens, the Greek Islands of Santorini and Mykonos, (Shirley
Valentine’s island - great movie), Naples, Civitavecchia for Rome, Livorno
for Florence, Villefranche for Nice, Monte Carlo - Monaco, and finally to Barcelona,
where we disembarked on Friday the 29th of July and travelled back to the UK
for ten days.
The opulence of the French Riviera is astounding, and
to give you an idea of the wealth that abounds in this
very ritzy area, the harbours are teeming with multi-million
dollar yachts and large and obviously very expensive
hotels and private prime real estate crowd the area as
a testimony to the wealth that surrounds you.
The Casino
in Monte Carlo doesn’t open until after
midday, (early afternoon), and as one has to be suitably dressed for the occasion
and pay an entrance fee, and as we had other places to see and things to do
the timing was not opportune for us to enter those hallowed
halls. On the other hand, just in order to see how the
other half live we ventured into the Hotel de Paris just
to study the luncheon menu. The set menu was priced at
105 Euros per person, (which with an exchange rate of
around one Euro equal to $1.25), translated into $131.25
per person, and if one ventured to order al la Carte
the soup alone was priced at 62 Euros, which translates
into $77.50 per serving, unbelievable, perhaps its served
from golden tureens into very expensive Marie Antoinette
soup dishes. We of course didn’t have the time
or the inclination to partake of such high priced gourmet
delights.
We found Nice to be very nice, (sorry for the pun),
and if we had say a billion dollars in a Swiss bank,
or any other bank for that matter, we could easily live
there - but there again, if we had a billion dollars
in any bank we could live very comfortably anywhere in
the world and even purchase on the side a very extravagant
yacht, or an executive jet aircraft, or even both. But
- if we had that kind of bank balance one thing we would
certainly do, would be to make a lot of people very happy
from a monetary standpoint. But there again, one must
remember that it is not always the poor people, (money
wise), who are unhappy - wealth has its obvious draw-backs
and just because you maybe one of the idle rich it does
not follow that amongst other things, health and happiness
do not necessarily go along with monetary wealth, but
it obviously goes a long way to making the people with
that kind of money very comfortable in their misery.
A villa or a penthouse suite close to the Promenade
des Anglaise in Nice comes readily to mind - but there
again our current abode in Laguna Niguel, California,
where we live in a relatively small community in a pleasant
single story home situated upon a hillside with sea and
mountain views, (plus the perennial California sunshine),
is not too shabby a place to live even when one considers
the occasional winter rains followed by mud slides, earthquakes,
and then the late summer fire storms.
Of course there’s no Shangri la on this grain
of sand that we call earth, and if one can put up with
the occasional potential natural catastrophic disasters,
one can enjoy a pretty lazy and comfortable lifestyle
in the nearly year round sunshine.
We have been very fortunate in our worldly travels
to have cruised a number of times and have visited many
far away places by ship, but none of the places visited
come close, to the best of my recollection, to the affluence
of the Cote d’Azur.
From Barcelona we took a flight back to London Heathrow
and picked up a car to travel to Marlborough, Wiltshire,
in order to spend some time with Sheena’s two sisters
and their families and also at the same time travel around
England for a few days before returning to California
on Sunday the 7th of August.
We welcome feedback about any of the contents of these
newsletters. Please send all correspondence to bill_sykes@huddersfield1.co.uk
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