We just had seven good friends to visit at Villa 10, our holiday home just outside Cannes, for a long weekend. What followed was four days of good food, warm evenings, questionable decisions about bottle sizes — and one celebrity who simply wouldn't leave us alone.

The journey

The trip started with the usual handover of Cæsar the dog to Lars (Nina's brother, and our official dog-sitter), signed in the nick of time before we hit a massive tunnel queue. Somewhere between Oslo and Gardermoen, we also managed to sign the contract on our new penthouse apartment at Turbinveien. Not a bad commute.

Pablo's big adventure

Pablo always does the job, but suddenly he refused to mow the lawn in front of the house.

Arriving at Villa 10, we were greeted by a crisis. Pablo — our robotic lawnmower — had refused to cross from the back garden to the front. This turned out to be deeply triggering for Nils, who is currently fighting the exact same battle with his own robot at home. He had, in fact, gotten up in the middle of the night before the trip to help his mower over a troublesome ridge.

Within hours, Nils, Bjørn and I had torn up the guide cable, located the break, laid a new one, and eliminated a small ant colony in the process. Pablo now roams freely on both sides of the house. Mission accomplished.

The grill that waited ten years

A decade ago, Nina won a Weber grill in a competition. It has been in storage ever since. This summer Thomas drove it down to France with Arne — a long journey for a grill that had never cooked a single thing.

That was last summer, and the grill had a since then been waiting in our shed - still good looking, but not even close to cooking…. Getting it going turned out to be an adventure in itself and luckily the guys were eager to help getting it (well) done. Wrong regulators, incompatible gas bottles, a lengthy debate about propane versus butane, and — just to keep things interesting — left-handed fittings on the gas hose. Frustration rose as we kept screwing the wrong way before anyone noticed.

The solution came from our old grill's regulator. Butane. Done. Nils and Petter assembled the whole thing with surprising competence, and the grill finally earned its place in the world.

Baby, baby, baby!

The Metusalem bottle contains 6 litres or the equivalent of 8 bottles. Of course I´m smiling.

On a walk through Cannes, we stumbled into a wine shop and made a completely rational decision: a Metusalem of Minuty rosé. Six litres. Eight standard bottles. Named after the biblical patriarch who lived to 969 — a fitting symbol for a bottle we were slightly afraid to open.

She was heavy. She required two hands and a certain commitment. Somewhere along the walk to Plage l'Alba for dinner, she acquired a name: Baby. As in, our precious baby. And nobody puts Baby in the corner!

Well - baby actually sat in the corner while we enjoyed our dinner at Plage l´Alba. (Forgive us, but tomorrow you will be the star!)
The food matched the occasion and we where hungry! In the end it was the drinks for dessert that got the cameras attention 🍹🍸😋

We also drank a bottle of Abbaye de Lérins — produced on the islands you can see from the restaurant terrace. And anchored just offshore: the world's largest sailing ship, The Orient Express Corinthian. Bjørn, who knows everything worth knowing about boats, gave us the full briefing.

At dinner the next day, Baby was opened with considerable ceremony, poured with even more difficulty, and finished without regret. She went surprisingly fast! The food matched the occasion. The new (old) Webers baptism with steaks and delicious french sausages.

Saint-Tropez — or as the Swedes call it, “Troppan”

We took the boat from Cannes. 71 euros a head, cold 1664s on deck, and the dramatic red Esterel mountains sliding past as we headed east. Bjørn informed us, in the manner of someone who has always known this, that people in the know call it "Troppan." We have called it that ever since.

On our way to “Troppan”. Massif d´Esterel in the background.

The market at Place des Lices was closed (Tuesdays and Saturdays only, we learned afterwards). We visited the Citadelle instead, which turned out to be full of peacocks — magnificent, iridescent, and extraordinarily loud for birds that look that good. We took a group photo at the top with a view over the terracotta rooftops and the yacht-filled harbour below. Worth every euro of the boat ticket.

Antibes

Antibes gave us a morning of wandering through the old town — bougainvillea spilling over stone walls, colourful lanterns strung across narrow streets, and the best ice cream any of us had eaten in recent memory: rose-shaped sorbet scooped to order at the counter. There was brief debate about whether the technique justified the price. It did.

The guys contemplated buying identical shirts in a shop on the way to the beach club (three of us did), and wore them without any apparent self-consciousness for the rest of the trip.

Brad

The Cannes Film Festival was in full swing while we were there. We noticed early on that a man who looked remarkably like Brad Pitt kept appearing near our group. At the restaurant. On the Croisette. In a cycling selfie up in the hills. Back at the villa, inexplicably wearing a matching shirt.