Luna de Miel, Day Four

We wake up at an unbelievably beautiful hotel in Piemonte. With unbelievably beautiful grounds and rooms, etc. Of course it's cloudy and smells like rain. God forbid the Schulten's be permitted to spend 5 minutes in the sun on their honeymoon. This hotel has a perfect spa with a deck that overlooks this:

Husband keeps commenting about the fact that we were assigned room 101. He keeps mentioning 1984 and Winston's betrayal of Julia. Wife perplexed why husband feels it necessary to repeatedly bring this up on honeymoon. We have breakfast in one of the sitting rooms, where they pass around bread with Nutella, which is produced in Piemonte (many hazlenuts are grown there, though they now have to import hazlenuts as not enough are grown locally to produce Nutella). Of course two massages in as many days seems a little ridiculous, and we have to get back to Monaco, so we just spend a few hours relaxing around the hotel and spa. Husband excitedly a heavily salted pool which allows a person to just float and not sink. He's amazed. We sadly leave Piemonte, trash the Google maps and follow the course back down the mountain. Twenty minutes into our drive down a winding mountain road (think Colorado, with fewer guard rails) it begins to POUR. Like cats and dogs POUR. By the grace of God, we make it back to Monaco safely, having made only two wrong direction choices in Monaco. We return the rental car and walk back to our hotel.

We get dressed up and head to the Bar Americain in the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo. It's cheese-tastic. There's a lounge singer who does a Louis Armstrong impression all night long, but the band bangs out the classics, and the crowd is fun to watch. We determine that it's some law in the Russian oligarchy that women must wash their hair in hydrogen peroxide. They must also wear ridiculously skanky outfits, even if they are 45. On the flip side, apparently white suits with white shoes are all the rage in Tokyo, and kimonos are not simply broken out for events like weddings - a night at le Casino is good enough. We eat all of this up, mind you, especially when Sachmo sings "Georgia on My Mind." We toast our own Mrs. Quinn, and bid adieu to the Bar Americain.

We eat dinner at a Napolitan restaurant. This meal would prove to be husband's undoing. More on that in day 5! After dinner we head into le Casino, which husband points out, is not just "a" casino, but is "the" Casino, and places where you gamble were likely not called "casinos" before this one. The salons are really beautiful. We have a couple of drinks as we walk around (you have to pay 10 euro to get in, which makes sense, considering the only other money we gave the house was in return for booze). We saw unlucky people at roulette, and some lucky people at black jack. Definitely a lot of characters, but noticeably missing were fanny backs, denim shorts, t-shirts and mullets (though that's not to say the haircuts were all normal). They definitely enforce a dress code here.