SHE CAME, SHE WORE, SHE CONQUERED!

I celebrated my birthday this year (I was born on the 4th of July - did you expect me to be born on any other day??) with eleven fabulous, fearless female friends on the French Riviera for a week of festivities (ooooh, so much fantastic alliteration!). In case you didn't know, the trip was ALL ABOUT ME! (of course) and I warn you, it’s a long one, so take a looooooooong break, put your feet up and come relive it with me.

I started planning this trip almost a year ago. Five years ago I made myself a party to be remembered, almost like a wedding; a sit-down black tie affair atop the W Hotel in Chicago, replete with purple twinkle lights, purple eyelash tablecloths, blinking lip lights in the red and purple flowers, music from the decades of my life and people seated by those decades and oh, so much more shtick. You know how I love shtick!! The theme was formal black and white with a touch of purple (my favorite color). The gals wore long gowns with purple flowers or scarves, the guys resplendent in their tuxes with purple cummerbunds or ties. And moi, in a red sequin gown with the requisite purple boa and life before blondness.

So now I had to top that. Oh, what would I do? My first choice was to charter a yacht and cruise the Greek Isles. But the more I researched the more disheartened I became in realizing my champagne taste was suffering from beer pockets. In the style that I like to experience life, it was cost prohibitive, especially with oil prices, yes even in Greece. My second option was a villa in Italy and no, I have never been there, deliberately. Ah, but
that’s a topic for another time. It was not doable because I needed a commitment from a number of people to know what size villa to reserve and that was an impossible task.

Sometimes the universe decides for you. Too "Ghandhi" for y'? Well this ex-New Yawker says, “get over it.” I went on vacation to Prague with my friend Chris from Wales this past Fall and we stayed at one of the small leading hotels of the world. I love boutique hotels especially Relais and Chateaux. Whenever you check in or out of these places they always have a book of all their member properties around the world so I grabbed one to read on the plane. I dropped the book as I was leaving the hotel and it fell open to the funkiest, hippest, most unique, colorful place I have ever seen. It was the Hotel 3.14 in Cannes on the French Riviera where they have the famous film festival. This was indeed fate.

I have always dreamed of going to the Cote d’Azur, the South of France, specifically Monte Carlo. It seemed like the ultimate topper. What if I got friends from all over to go with me?

Hey, you have to dream big! I plotted, I planned, I asked, I researched, I Googled, I gathered info from every source and then some and here are the results.