Musings
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Thanksgiving Prep
This is the current situation at my house. I have washed the good china, and just finished polishing the silver. I’m not going to use our good crystal glasses this year, they are too fragile and I don’t want to risk them getting broken. Back when we got married, almost 30 years ago, couples registered for china, silver, and crystal. We don’t use them often, but we do use them a couple of times a year. Sometimes for Valentine’s Day, always for Canadian Thanksgiving, and then if we have Christmas or U.S. Thanksgiving here. We celebrate two Thanksgivings, just because it is fun. Ted was born in Canada, though his…
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Friday Randomness – 5 Things
Today’s post will be 5 Things I’m thinking about.
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NaBloPoMo
Here’s a random photo from a recent morning walk. When Maya was little we always entered this park through a local trail, and didn’t know what it’s official name was, so we called it ‘Elmo Park’, after her favorite Sesame Street character. I realized the other day that my blogging etiquette has gone to hell. I mentioned on November 1st that I was going to try to post every day, but at that point I didn’t know that there was anyone trying to host a group of bloggers with a list and so on. I wandered over to NGS’s blog a few days in, and found that she was participating,…
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Picture of the Day – Cemetery in Vincennes
My cousin and I didn’t go to any of the famous cemeteries in Paris when we were there in September, but we did happen upon this walled in cemetery on the same street as our hotel in Vincennes. Knowing nothing about it, we didn’t explore and see if we could find any famous people there. Looking at this picture, that fourth grave has a lot of flowers, perhaps a recent addition? I like the calm of cemeteries, and these multi person tombs are lovely. But somehow it feels strange to explore too much, so we just looked around for a few minutes and then got on our way. I did…
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Get Out the Vote
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m starting my day with Wordle, a cup of tea, and some post card writing. I have a stash of generic looking postcards that I bought a few years ago on Amazon, and I’m sending encouragement to registered Democrats in Georgia, encouraging them to get out and vote, and re-elect Senator Warnock in the run-off election on December 6th. If you’re inclined to join me, time is short. I go through an organization called Tony the Democrat, and once you sign up with them, they will text and/or email you a list of addresses, as few as 5 and as many as 50. I have 14…
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Cheese Glorious Cheese
Here you see my cousin Carey, talking to the Fromager at the little cheese shop in Vincennes, the town where we spent our nights (and some days) just outside of the Paris city limits. I told you about the day we were too worn out from our travels, including lots of driving and late nights, to stick with our initial plan of driving to Versailles. We stayed local, got massages, had a glass of wine and watched people, then got some food to eat, brought it back to our time-share, and watched a movie, ate bread, cheese, salami, and drank wine. And did laundry. It was a nice, lazy day.…
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Onion Soup in France
This sad, sad picture is of our dinner one evening in Cannes. We had had a lovely lunch (I think this was the day we took the boat to Saint Tropez and had a big lunch, so we weren’t terribly hungry), so we thought we would a light dinner. Carey had been wanting French Onion soup, so when I saw ‘Soupe a l’oignon’ on a menu, we decided to give it a try. I don’t think it’s that big of a thing in the South of France, and we hadn’t seen it on any menus yet. This was the soup we received…the broth was not the dark, rich broth, the…
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Pictures of the Day – Fruit in Mougins
We absolutely fell in love with the local boulangerie in Mougins. We began our days by walking down our little hill and getting a baguette, croissant, or pastry for breakfast. The quality was AMAZING, and the staff were wonderful. Above is breakfast one day, amazing croissant, amazing fruit, amazing French butter and locally produced jam. The tea is British, I brought my tea bags from home, which I buy from the local Indian shops and are imported from England. The ashtray is useless, but I left it in the picture because it seemed very French to me. Due to COVID, there was often a line in front of the store.…
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Picture of the Day – Shopping for Gifts
While in France, I did a little gift shopping. I bought Christmas gifts for Ted and Maya, and for my siblings and Mother figures (that’s my step mom and my mother in law). One thing I wanted for Ted was a nice shirt, but not something for work. Too much like getting school clothes as a gift. There was a shirt I liked at a shop in Vincennes, but I wasn’t sure of the size, and I wasn’t sure it was something he would actually wear, and it was almost $200. I would absolutely spend $200 to get Ted a shirt from France that I knew he would love and…
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Picture of the Day – Train Station
Busy day today, and we have darling friends arriving in mere minutes for dinner, so I will make this brief. This is the stairway from the train station to the glamorous and stunning restaurant that I posted about a few days ago. Kind of brings it back down to earth, right? HA!
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Paris! Part III
Our 3rd full day in Paris started with a VERY fancy lunch, at one of the restaurants in one of the train stations, Gare de Lyon. The restaurant is Le Train Bleu. We didn’t have reservations anywhere on our trip, because we really never knew where we would be and didn’t want to have to work around it. So when I tried to make a reservation the day before and saw they were booked for the next month, we decided to give walking in a try. Happily, this worked for us. We arrived just before noon, and were told that they had reservations for 1:00, so if we could make…
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Paris! Part II
Above are the beautiful stained glass windows of Sainte Chapelle, a stunning gothic chapel built in the mid 1200s. Sainte Chapelle is located on the same island as Notre-Dame de Paris, Île de la Cité in the river Seine. Unlike Notre Dame, Sainte Chapelle is no longer a church. We actually started our day at Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre. We used a helpful app called CityMapper to get us from point A to point B, which you can use in any location, not just Paris. It will tell you what the quickest options are. Unfortunately for us, we were unfamiliar enough with the area that we didn’t know that it was…
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Paris! – Part I
While we spent 10 nights in the Paris area, at this point we’ve been here almost a week and spent very little time seeing the sights of Paris herself. The next four days were spent enjoying a taste of the beauty that Paris has to offer. We started off at the Palais Garnier, which is a stunning venue built for the Paris Opera, and opened in 1875. It was the home of the Paris Opera until 1989, when the Opera Bastille opened. Since that time, Opera is primarily performed at the Bastille, while the Garnier is primarily Ballet performances. The picture above is the Grand Foyer. From there we moved…
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Monet’s Gardens and Mont. St. Michel
Carey and I decided to spend a couple of days outside of Paris/Vincennes, so we rented a car and drove to Giverny, home of Monet’s home and his famous gardens. The picture above is a home in Giverny that I liked, not really affiliated with Monet. We had so much trouble with our big car in the south of France, so we were dismayed when we were given an SUV this time, though we had requested a much smaller car. When we asked about this, the car rental employee told us that the problem is that most Europeans drive manual cars, and thus there are not a lot of automatics.…
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Vincennes and a Bit of Paris
Our Paris timeshare was in the neighboring town of Vincennes, which is not technically part of Paris, but where I was corrected by a shopkeeper that they do consider themselves to be part of Paris. Fair enough, it is just over the border anyway. It is a lovely neighborhood, with lots of shops and their very own chateau, the Chateau de Vincennes. On our first full day in Paris, a Saturday, we decided to stay local and get to know our neighborhood. We asked the concierge at our timeshare for a recommendation for lunch, and she sent us to a truly lovely restaurant, Nido. The food, ambiance, and service were…