Hi everybody, sorry to have been away for so long!!!
Work but also holiday time kept me away from you all :(. I have not been able to come over and say Hi yet, but I am very curious to learn what you have been doing in the last month! I will come and see you in the next days :D!
As far as I am concerned, I have been very lucky: this summer, for the first time, my humans decided to go on holiday with me instead of going to visit their “fishes friends”, ie. no scubadiving, but dog trekking and sightseeing instead :)!!!
Last year my humans went for a few days to a place in France that is called Mentone, on the French Riviera, for a few days on a sailing boat. They found that France is a very dog friendly place :). We doggies are not allowed on the beaches (not all of them), some we can go to, some we can go after a certain hour, but the hotel, the restaurants, the pubs, they are all (well, most) wellcoming us, isn’t it great? So this year, instead of going sailing on the boat, they took me with them and we visited Provence. It was a short holiday, only four days, but I had a lot of fun!
My human booked the hotels via web with the “Accord” chain and they specified that the hotels they were looking for had to be pet-friendly. In any case, since I am not a small dog, my human contacted all the hotels we found of interest to us prior to the reservation to make sure there were no size limits to the pets they were accepting, and nobody made a problem to my size (we had instead a problem like this in Italy: a restaurant said they accepted dogs, but when we went in, they were surprised to see me and said they were accepting only small ones :(, idiots…. I think you either do or don’t… but anyway, that is what happened even if we asked, that is why we now make sure people understand that a great dane will visit them…)
We set off on a tuesday to avoid all the traffic of the weekend (august is a tremendously crowdy period for holidays in Italy and South France) and went to a place called Valbonne that is not far away from the famous location “Cannes” (the place is really famous for the annual “film festival”, every year in May you can find around a lot of Holliwood and Europe film’s stars….).
Here I am comfortably enjoying my journey in the back of Nicoletta’s car:
She has a medium car – may be small for a dane (it is an Opel Astra GTC) – but it is fine for the three of us… We need to travel light, without too many luggages or we do not know where to store them ;)!!! Hei humans, remember to take Mrs Chicken, food and my bowls please!
See I am really comfortable here: I am sitting on my bean bed, so I save space and I am lying on a very soft cushion 🙂
Since they were worried the air conditioning might not be cooling me off in the proper way, they made sure we had a stop every 200 kms, sometimes less.
They also took with us a harness and a special leash you use to link us doggies to the seats, so that if I was too hot I could sit on the back sit, and be fresher than behind:
PS: if you use this leash, please make sure you do not use it with a normal collar but with a harness. If anything happens, even just a bad stop of the car, let alone a crush, you would be getting a severe pull on your neck. With an harness you get pulled on your shoulders but that is not as bad! The only problem is that these leashes are for small doggies, they are not very long for us danes…!!!
This is Mrs Chicken showing you what I mean 🙂
Stays better on me 😉
And this is me safely lying on the back seats!
We set off quite early and the journey was absolutely fine.
Once in Valbonne, we checked in the hotel (that was carefully selected because it has a lot of woods around and I had plenty of chances to made a walk around the premises to check peemail and stuff like that… and for the humans because there is a swimming pool). I will NEVER go in a swimming pool!!!! Don’t you know that us Danes do not need to show our swimming abilities to others? But my humans thought that was refreshing…..
After that we went to have dinner in Cannes: this is a map of the place!
Here I am with Mario walking along the famous “the Croisette”. Remember that there is a very important film festival here every year, does this mean I am a star too?
No, this is not my hotel, us stars want privacy you know…
The place is full of people, lights, doggies…. but I am not allowed on the beach, not even in the evening… not here…
You might be wondering how was my very first night in a hotel? I was the best dog ever… Well, I was a bit surprised at the beginning, because firstly I could not understand where I was… the only thing I could recognize was my bean bed… plus look here how unpolite… they put my water and food in the bathroom…!!!
Not that there was too much choice… I had issues getting there to eat or drink:
Wow, I am bigger than the bathroom!!!
I slept on my bean bed, next to my humans: I was a bit confused… I kept on hearing strange noises coming next to our door… so I barked! My humans were very worried that other guests were asleep and told me off very severely. I learnt my lesson, so whenever I heard something that I considered a threat to us or to our room, I made a strange sound, like a bark but very little voice… My humans would pet me and say everything was fine, so I would go back to sleep… I was sure they also heard it to be prepared to fight the intruders!!!
Next day we moved to Avignone… beautiful place…. if you have the chance to go, do not miss it, it is adorable, I liked it and so did my humans.
This is a map of Avignone:
This tower was at the entrance of old Avignone, just across the street from our hotel.
Before entering the old city walls I had my bathroom, really comfortable, grass there was perfect…
Place de l’Horloge
The “Palais des Papes“: it is a huge building where Popes went to stay when they had to leave Rome back in 1309. There is a link on the name that takes you to wikipedia to learn more about it. It is a unique Palace that has been recognized by Unesco for its great importance.
A nearer view of the “Palais des Papes”: it still does not give you the idea of how big it is…
Meeting a british doggie friend that looked a lot like me… well only had same colours…
In front of the famous “half” bridge of Avignon. The real name is “Pont Saint-Bénezet“.It was built around 1171-1185. Floads kept on damaging it over the centuries, till in 1668 a bad fload made part of it to collapse. It has not been repaired since then… you can infact see it does no longer get to the other side! Check the link if you are interested in knowing more about this medioeval bridge ;)).
But while we were back at the “Palais des Papes” ….:
Look who we met :D:
Yes, it is really Hsin-Yi!!! If you remember on Honey‘s post, she said she would be away for a while from her blog, because her humans are on holiday in France…. That is true, I can confirm that Honey!
We went for an ice cream together:
and we met for dinner also!
While we were walking to the restaurant, Hsin-Yi spotted a nice little church and we thought it would have been nice to take some pictures of just me sitting in front of it. Next two the church there was a restaurant with lots of people having dinner… Well, I gave them a show of my abilities…. I started with a sit (“seduta”):
than Nicoletta gave me a down (“terra”)
And then she even dared to ask for an “up” or “stand” (“su” – this is hilarious because in the school the trainer wanted to teach me this command with “up” and I could not get it… My human changed it in “su” and I now master at it… Well, can you believe that many doggies in my school are now trained with the “su” command? Noone else uses it in Italy also…. My human should ask for a copyright)
I am good eh? So can you see the guy on my right? Well, he is taking a picture of me… and so were the people at the restaurant… they could not understand what was going on, and because Hsin-Yi had the big camera machine, I think they wandered if we were pros making a commercial shooting…. Great eh???? We had a big laugh at this!!!
See, we were infact laughing at the people that were so interested in us… and I was still standing in the meantime… btw, I had to do it for free, no treats for this can you believe it???? This is against doggies’ rights!
After dinner we went to a cafè to have some drinks: Paul was missing Honey and Muesli a lot, so I tried to tell him not to worry, that they were surely fine!
Poor Mario, Nicoletta was so happy to meet Hsin-Yi that she completely forgot to use the camera machine… so if there are any pictures, it is all for his work!!! Else you would need to wait for Hsin-Yi’s photos!!! She took a lot of them!
Paul and Hsin-Yi also took me a present… Kangaroo’s yummies!!! I loved them!!!! They also took a great belt for my humans to use when we go out walking, useful isn’t it?
It has space for doggies plastic bags (to be polite owners), you can put your keys in, some money, you also have a clip to attach other things, like my owner takes with her a light when we go out late in the night. See all the features it has:
I was so tired for the lovely evening that I collapsed on my bed immediately…. no time to do my guarding duty… I had very sweet dreams!
But I was almost forgetting another nice part of the holiday…. I loved breakfast time….!!!
I was allowed in the breakfast area and so I could have breakfast too… Mario fed me with bread and ham… just because I was on holiday too!!!
On the last day I was really tired…
I was laying my head here and there…
Can you see my eyes want to close? But I never gave in!!!
This is the total journey we made:
I really had a nice time, hope my humans will take me on holiday again soon… 😀
Ciao Lucille
Lucille, A Great Dane in HumanLand... 
