Prisoners and Movie Stars

Another day trip from Nice took us the opposite direction from Monaco to a little town called Cannes. Yep, the one with the festival. Now, I had been there 10 years ago for the film festival, which was a very different experience than going there at a time when screaming fans and fancy movie stars are kept to a minimum.

This trip started with us getting completely turned around on the way from the train station to the port. We looked at a map, evaluated where we thought we were, and marched confidently off into the complete opposite direction from our intended destination. Which meant we missed the boat we had hoped to take at noon to Ile St. Margeurite, a small island off the coast of Cannes. The next boat wasn’t until 2, so we had to kill a couple of hours roaming around Cannes. Tough life.

We wandered around and found a very cute little place to grab a panini and salad with a very sweet old lady who was very concerned that my friend did not eat her tomatoes, then was very sympathetic to find out about her tomato allergy.

After lunch, it was back to the port and aboard the boat to Ile St. Marguerite.

View of Ile St. Marguerite

Looking back at Cannes from the boat to Ile St. Marguerite

Ile St. Marguerite is the site of a really old fort/prison complex where the Man in the Iron Mask was locked up for a while, as well as a bunch of Protestant priests when the Catholic French king wasn’t wild about having them around in the late 1600s. Today the fort/prison area is a museum and the rest of the island is a forested nature preserve-type thing with some nice views.

After a look around and a tour of the fort/prison, where we learned that no one still knows who the man in the iron mask was, and realized that neither of us had either read the book or seen the movie and therefore didn’t even know the fictional version, we headed back to Cannes, took a stroll past the Palais des Festivals, and hopped a train home to Nice.