Menton Citrus Festival

So last week was a very long week. The deadline for the HST proposals was on Friday. At 2am Saturday morning French time. And yes, we were still up working on it at 2am. I got into the office at 10am Friday morning and left 16 hours later! That was a long day.
So I had a much deserved lie in on Saturday morning. In the afternoon, I did my shopping and then headed with Gerry into Menton. Menton is a small town along the coast, just past Monaco on the way to Italy. Every year they have a citrus festival. They have a parade along the see front which we didn't see as it is sold out. However, they also have a citrus exhibition garden.
There are loads of big displays all made out of oranges and lemons. Each one was from one of the region in France.

From the Champagne region

Castle made of oranges and lemons

Giant orange/lemon man

Eiffel tower as you've never seen it before

There are also stalls selling citrus based products. We had some very nice samples of orange liqueurs, lemoncello (Menton is only a few miles from the Italian border), and lime-cello, which is really nice. Unfortunately they were all a bit too expensive and too heavy to bring home. We also tried some of the marmalade. I am not a big marmalade fan but some were very nice.

Lemon, lime and orange liqueurs - very nice!

The best stall in my opinion was the Grand Marnier stall which sold crepes with of course Grand Marnier. I had a chocolate crepe with Grand Marnier. And they let you pour your own liqueur. Mine was drenched! It was fantastic. And accompanied with a hot lemonade.

Heaven!

After that we head back to Nice and Gerry cocked me a very nice meal of grilled fresh fish and veggies, with black rice. This was top off with a really nice bottle of wine called Pouilly-Fuse, which I thought was from the Loire valley, one of the region I still need to sample. But I got the name wrong. I wanted the Pouilly-Fume instead. The Pouilly-Fuse is from the Burgundy region. Still it was a very nice wine.

very nice ending!