Juan les Pins at dawn

A quick trip to France to talk to HP about storage virtualisation and to do the press day at VMWorld (where we discovered one of Simon's old colleagues has just moved jobs from the first to the second) had its highlights too. What with the disappearing belt at security and the coach that went round all the airport terminals twice, we got to Juan les Pins in time to walk along the beach and enjoy the sunset and go looking for a nice restaurant for dinner. There's going to be a better choice later in the season - nothing says out of season like digging up half of the streets and closing the boulangerie - but we'd go back to Le Perroquet in a shot if every restaurant in town was open.

It has one of those big plastic awning-cum-sheets that you get on French restaurants and I said 'tourist' but Simon said 'French tourist' and he was right. The ratatouille avec son oeuf mollet was tempting but I had the honey goats cheese potato bacon salad and he had the fish soup and we both had the escalope with anchovy cream and tiny crushed subes of garlic mushroom under the sauteed new potatoes. As I had pear sorbet doused in poire william eau de vie I can't remember what Simon had for desert and the vin de local was very nice too. There is a full set of rustic coffee pots setting off a range of parakeet memorabilia - including Ting's parrots (which I kept thinking was a Franz Marc at the time).


To better enjoy the pounding of the surf on the beach outside the room I hadn't drawn the curtains which is why I woke at dawn. The sky was palest blue puffed over with pink clouds, the full moon was silvery pale and casting a silver moon path over the sea onto the beach and I thought if I got out my camera and opened the window and took a picture I'd never get back to sleep, so I shall just have to remember it...

And then we worked for two days solid, talked shop all through dinner but couldn't get the HP folks to leak anything about horizontal storage that they weren't ready to, had five minutes to see what's left of the beach at Cannes and sat at the airport with a quiche writing blog posts and reviews. And on Friday we're off again: LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, San Jose. Must remember to see if our schedule matches with liralen!