Stef + Ethan's European Vacation
What better time to share our summer vacation now that you’ve seen where it all began: Georgia & Mark’s destination wedding!
Although Ethan + I were only in Greece for less than 72 hours we tried our best to use our free time wisely and take as many personal photos while we could. We finished shooting the wedding around 4AM, went for one last late night swim in the sea before packing up and leaving for the airport at 7AM. We had a few weeks off before having to come back to Toronto for Pam + Tyler's wedding so since we were already in Europe, we decided to take a little mid-season vacation and head to Italy and France!
Our first stop was Italy- we stayed in Rome for a few days at an AirBnB just outside the city (but a couple of blocks and 1 hill away from the subway so we were still able to get around easily). Ethan's never been to Rome so we went to all the main tourist attractions (Vatican, Colosseum, Trevi, etc.) all within a couple of days of walking around.
We had an extra day before going to France so we decided to hop on a train and go to Naples and climb Mt. Vesuvius. You Guys. DO NOT. Do. This. On A. Sunday/DO do this with a guide. We took a 3 hour train ride from Rome to Naples, another hour train from Naples to ??? I'm not even sure where because we got lost *facepalm*. We wandered around some town for a couple of hours before deciding to just go right back to our Airbnb in Rome (this is after having to purchase another set of train tickets because our scheduled train ride was 3 hours away and those tickets couldn't be moved to a different time slot JEEZ). Can you spot which photo below is me looking 10/10 happy to be lost and overheated in Naples?
See photos from Greece + Rome below, click the photos to enlarge and browse through
After Rome we went to France; we flew into Nice, rented a car and drove to Provence.
We stayed with an incredible farmer and his truffle hunting dog, Enzo. This was my absolute favourite part of our trip! I've never seen or been in mountains before so getting to drive through them was definitely an experience! The weather wasn't perfect when we were there so on rainy days we just drove from town to town and when it was sunny and warm we spent our time at the Lac de St. Croix which has the most turquoise water I've ever seen! Pro tip: If you want to go into the Verdon Gorge do not rent a boat. The gorge gets quite narrow and is really busy in the summer, so best way to get through is in a kayak or paddle boat! The boats also caps at like 10km/hr so it literally takes 3 hours to go round trip on something a normal boat would take 20 minutes to do!!
Following Provence we drove back down to Nice for a few days. As a beach town there isn't a ton to do and since we still had our rental car so we took a couple of day trips to Monaco and Cannes- both are less than an hour away from Nice and worth going to!
As our trip came to an end we were scheduled to fly home from Paris but at this point in our trip we were tired of being at the airport so we spontaneously decided to drive from Nice to Paris instead of flying (it's an 8 hour drive on the toll highway, about 12 hours without tolls). We only had 1 full day in Paris so of course we hit up the Eiffel Tower, Lourve (just from the outside), Champ Elysee, etc. We stayed in the 2nd Arr. around Étienne Marcel which was filled with the most incredible restaurants, I wish we were there longer just so we could eat more!
