Part Three of our South of France Series
By the time we got to the question of how many days we actually needed in Nice, I had already started to realise that my original plan for the South of France was a little too ambitious.
This wasn’t because there wasn’t enough to do. Quite the opposite. The more I researched the Côte d’Azur, the more places I found that seemed close enough to add to the itinerary. Nice was our base, so Monaco was an obvious day trip. Antibes was easy enough to reach. Èze was on the list. Menton was somewhere I had considered. Then there were the beach days, the restaurants I wanted to try and, of course, actually spending some time in Nice itself.
On paper, it all seemed perfectly doable.
The reality was slightly different.
If you haven’t read it yet, you can read more about our experience in Part One of our South of France series, where I share whether Nice lived up to our expectations.
How Many Days Do You Really Need in Nice?
I think five to seven days in Nice is a good amount of time if you want to see some of the surrounding Côte d’Azur without turning the whole holiday into a series of departures and arrivals. You can do it in less, and you can certainly stay longer. I mean, if you’ve got 3 months of free time and budget – go for gold babes. But, for the rest of us, that middle ground gives you enough time to explore Nice properly while leaving some room for day trips.
The important part, though, is not necessarily how many days you have. It is what you try to fit into those days.
When I first planned our trip, I was looking at the Côte d’Azur almost as one big itinerary rather than thinking about Nice as a destination in its own right. If we were already there, why wouldn’t we see as much as we possibly could?
That sounds logical until you realise that every additional town means another journey, another timetable to consider and another day where you are working around getting somewhere rather than simply enjoying where you are.
And then there was something I hadn’t factored into my beautiful little itinerary nearly enough: I get motion sick. Now, if you’ve been reading my blog long enough, you’ll know that we’ve never been on a trip where I haven’t experienced some or other kind of motion sickness. By now, you’d think that’s the first thing I think of when planning an itinerary. But no… Wil mos alles sien!
When the Itinerary Doesn’t Quite Survive the Holiday
We had every intention of seeing more of the Côte d’Azur than we eventually did.
Some of that was because of the practicalities of getting around, and some of it was simply because once we were there, we didn’t always feel like rushing off to the next place. The routes around this part of France can be beautiful, but some of them are also winding, particularly when you start heading into the hills.
Èze was one of the places I had wanted to see, but the reality of getting there wasn’t quite as appealing to my stomach as it had been on my itinerary.
This is the part of travel planning that is difficult to account for from your laptop. You can research train times, look at photographs and map out your day down to the hour, but you cannot always predict how you are going to feel when you are actually there.
And once you are on holiday, I don’t think it makes sense to force yourself through a day simply because you put it in a spreadsheet three months earlier.
So, slowly, our itinerary started getting shorter.
Not because the places weren’t worth seeing. We simply realised that we didn’t need to see all of them.
We Stopped Trying to See Everything
There is a strange pressure that comes with travelling somewhere like the South of France.
You know you may not be back for a long time, so there is this temptation to make every day count. If Monaco is nearby, go to Monaco. If Antibes is nearby, go to Antibes. If Villefranche-sur-Mer is nearby, go to Villefranche-sur-Mer. Before you know it, you have planned a holiday where every morning begins with checking what time you need to leave to catch one of three trains to the next town.
We eventually realised that this wasn’t the holiday we wanted.
We didn’t want to spend our time in Nice constantly thinking about the next place we needed to get to. We wanted to be able to have a morning where we weren’t in a hurry. We wanted to walk around without having to keep an eye on the clock. We wanted to be able to sit somewhere for lunch and not immediately start calculating whether we were going to miss the train.
And, perhaps most importantly, I wanted the holiday to feel like a holiday.
That meant accepting that we were not going to see everything.
Our Côte d’Azur Travel Pass Didn’t Quite Go to Plan
This was also where our experience with the Pass SudAzur became a little ironic.
Before we left, I had spent time researching the different transport options around the region. The Pass SudAzur comes in three-, seven- and fourteen-day options, and because we were planning several outings from Nice, buying a pass seemed like a sensible thing to do.
The plan was to make enough use of it that it would work out better than paying for individual journeys.
Except our plans changed.
We ended up using the pass for only two trips, and a third trip we had planned didn’t happen. So, when I actually looked at what we had used it for, it had cost us more than simply buying the individual fares would have.
Which brings me to the question I probably should have asked before buying it:
Were we actually going to travel enough for it to be worth it?
If you missed it, you can read Part Two of our South of France series here.
Do You Need the Pass SudAzur?
I don’t think there is a universal yes or no answer here.
If you have several day trips planned and you are going to cluster those journeys together, the Pass SudAzur can make sense. The three-day option, in particular, becomes more useful if you have three days of travelling planned close together rather than spreading those trips throughout a longer stay.
That was the part I hadn’t really considered when I bought ours.
If, for example, you are staying in Nice for five days but planning your day trips with rest days in between, a three-day pass won’t necessarily cover all the travelling you intend to do. You could end up paying for a pass and still having to buy additional tickets outside the period it covers.
So, if you are considering one, I would work it out from the itinerary backwards.
Look at the towns you actually want to visit. Look at which days you are realistically going to travel. Then compare the individual fares with the relevant pass.
For us, paying as we went would have worked out better because our final itinerary was much lighter than the one we had originally imagined.
And that is probably the bigger lesson here.
Don’t buy a travel pass and then feel like you have to build your holiday around it!
A Three-Day Pass Doesn’t Mean Three Days of Your Holiday
This is worth mentioning because it is an easy distinction to miss when you are planning.
If you are spreading your day trips over five days, with a rest day or a beach day in between, a three-day pass doesn’t automatically mean you have three separate travel days available whenever you choose. The pass has its own validity period, and it starts operating from the same day of purchase. In other words, the day you purchase it is considered Day 1, so if you purchase it at 3 pm in the afternoon, it still counts as a day. Obviously, the optimum use would be to purchase it early in the morning.
If, however, you are planning to get your day trips done over three consecutive days, it can make much more sense.
So before buying one, I would look at the actual rhythm of your holiday rather than the number of places you think you might visit.
That was where our plans changed.
We had imagined a fuller itinerary, which made the pass seem like a sensible purchase. Once we were actually in Nice and started making decisions based on how we wanted to spend our days, the maths looked very different.
And I think that is why I would be more cautious about recommending a travel pass simply because it appears on a list of things you “need” for the South of France.
You don’t necessarily need one.
You need to know how you are actually going to travel.
Why We Decided Not to Chase the Original Itinerary
There is something quite freeing about realising that you don’t have to complete your own itinerary.
Once we accepted that we weren’t going to see every place we had originally planned, the holiday became much easier.
We could make decisions based on the day in front of us instead of the plan we had made months earlier. If we wanted to stay in Nice, we stayed in Nice. If we wanted to go somewhere, we went. If something didn’t work out, it wasn’t the end of the world.
And I think that made a bigger difference to the trip than seeing another town ever would have.
Because there is a point where a holiday stops being about experiencing a place and starts being about proving that you managed to fit everything in.
I have no interest in travelling like that.
How Many Days Do You Need for a Nice and Côte d’Azur Itinerary?
If you are using Nice as your base, I would personally give yourself at least five days, and preferably seven or more if you want to include a couple of day trips without feeling like you are constantly on the move.
That gives you time to experience Nice itself and still leave space for somewhere like Monaco or Antibes, or whichever towns you have added to your list of things to see on your trip to Nice, France.
And if you have fewer days, I would honestly resist the temptation to compensate by adding more destinations. I’d just explore Nice and go with the mindset of “see less, enjoy more”.
It sounds almost too obvious to say, but it is something I had to learn while we were actually there.
The South of France is one of those places where there will always be another town you could have added. Another beach. Another restaurant. Another train you could have caught.
You are never going to finish the list. And that’s exactly why I believe I can keep going back for summers to come. Hehe.
What I Would Do Differently Next Time
If I were planning our trip again, I would leave considerably more breathing room in the itinerary.
I would still use Nice as a base, because I liked having somewhere familiar to return to at the end of the day. I would still plan a couple of day trips, but I wouldn’t feel the need to fill every available day with another destination.
But I think I would do one other thing differently. I would choose another town along the Côte d’Azur and actually stay there for a couple of nights, either before heading to Nice or afterwards.
Antibes immediately comes to mind.
There was just something about being there that stayed with us. We obviously enjoyed our time there, but it was more than simply thinking, this is a pretty place, let’s take a few photos and move on. Being in Antibes did something to us.
We both said that if we return to the South of France, we would definitely want to spend more time staying in Antibes. Perhaps two nights, perhaps a little longer.
That’s probably the biggest change I would make next time. I wouldn’t necessarily spend more days travelling around the Côte d’Azur. I would spend more of those days actually staying in one of the places that caught us.
I would also wait until I had a much clearer idea of how many journeys we were actually going to make before buying a travel pass. Our Pass SudAzur looked like good value when I was sitting at home planning all the places we could visit. It was a different calculation once we were there and had abandoned half of those plans.
And perhaps that is the thing I would tell anyone planning a Nice itinerary now.
Plan the places you genuinely want to see, not the maximum number of places you can technically fit into the holiday.
Because our final itinerary was not the itinerary I started with.
It was slower. Less ambitious. We didn’t tick off everything. And, in the end, I think it suited us much better.
There is a lot more to say about what that actually meant for our South of France experience, particularly when you stop looking at Nice as simply a base for every other destination along the Côte d’Azur, and start looking at Nice itself as the destination for your holiday. Perhaps that is the shift I would make next time. Use Nice because you actually want to spend your holiday in Nice, and then choose one or two other towns along the Côte d’Azur that you genuinely want to experience, rather than treating every town as another box to tick from the same base.
And that, my friends, is where we will leave Part Three.
With love,
Keep #roamingwiththekolbes
More from the South of France series
Is Nice, France Worth Visiting? It Was What I Expected, and That’s Why I Fell in Love with It
Nadia Kolbe
