It dawned on me, finally, that three of the most prestigious/expensive beach communities on the Mediterranean Sea are located within 20 miles of each other, here on the Cote d’Azur.

From east to west … Monaco, Nice, Cannes.

Beach property. It is where people who can afford the expense want to be, in the summer, but also in the spring and fall, when warmth also can be found on the Mediterranean — when it already has fled the France of Paris and the north.

We landed in Nice two weeks ago, and have heard good things about it, and how it is on the rise … and this week saw Monaco, the tiny principality next door to Nice … and we completed the trifecta today by driving to Cannes, best known for its film festival.

All three cities are internationally famous/glamorous. And a person could visit all three in the same day with not all that much time given over to travel.

The cluster of Mediterranean hot spots begins to explain the roads that France has built in the area.

This part of France is a long way from any of the other major population centers of the country, and as we drove on the A8 tollway, noting the lack of major cities all the way to Aix-en-Provence, about 120 miles.

I was impressed by how the A8 is three lanes in each direction throughout this region of France, which is separated from most of the rest of France by distances and rough terrain.

We took the scenic route into Cannes, however, on the D559 highway which runs along the coast of the Cote d’Azur and is the main road in the bits from Saint Raphael down to Saint Tropez and then on to Toulon — which is generally considered the end of the Cote d’Azur, though I think a case could/should be made that it should end at Saint Tropez. But I digress.

Like the other two of the Big Three cities of the eastern bit of the Cote, Cannes has an expansive harbor that is welcoming to the rich and ultra-rich who like to ply the Mediterranean in their super yachts during the summer.

Nice is a significant town in its own right, with the only major airport in the region, and tiny Monaco has the cachet of being its own country with curious laws and customs.

Cannes has more beaches than does Monaco, and can handle more sea traffic.

And, of course, it has the Film Festival, staged in May of each year since 1946.

We might have ambled down the Boulevard de la Croisette, on the water, or gone out to the Palais des Festivals, headquarters of the film festival … but it was raining and cold, by local standards (sub-50 Fahrenheit).

We settled for driving through the town, nodding at the predictable array of designer shops, and the big hotels, and the busy harbor … and then turned around and returned to Les Issambres via that marvel of engineering, the A8, the key pieces of the Cote d’Azur, a remarkable stretch of coastline, now committed to memory.