Thankful Thoughts
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Picture of the Day – Locks of Love
There is a relatively recent custom in Paris (and other European cities) for couples to put locks on bridges and railings, which is adding so much weight to said railings, fences, and bridges that they are threatening to destroy them. This is a railing near Sacre Coeur with thousands of locks, and you can see how they might do damage. Of course, the souvenir shops in the area sell the locks, so most tourists don’t know that it is doing damage and that the city has to remove the locks periodically. Personally I don’t get it, and I don’t find it charming or romantic, but clearly there are a lot…
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Picture of the Day – Street Performer in Paris
Our last day in Paris found us back at Sacre Coeur. Carey liked the neighborhood vibe, and wanted to climb the front steps to the church, which we had missed before. This time we knew which Metro train to take, and what exit to take. It was Sunday now, and more crowded than the first time we were there. I think it’s generally a crowded area, though, unless you are staying close by and get there early. As we approached the church, this man was putting on quite a show. You can’t really see it in this picture, but he is balancing a soccer ball. He started out doing all…
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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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Picture of the Day – Tapestries
Exciting new feature! A temporary installation, if you will. It’s almost bedtime on November 1st, and I’ve been debating back and forth about writing here every day for the month, as I have done several times before. I thought about how, when I was in France, I had intended to post here every day, at least a picture, and my iPad started acting poopy. It’s still poopy, I tried to load this picture using it, and it tried four time and failed and gave me error messages. Then when I boot up a regular computer, the picture is there, four times. Whatever. Anyway, I’m going to try to post every…
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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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Our Day of Rest
After two days of many hours on the road, we awoke (late) on Wednesday morning with plans to go get breakfast from a local place that advertised pancakes and omelettes (we’d been eating croissants and baguettes most days, were ready for a bit of a change), then get in the car and drive to Versailles. Versailles isn’t that far from Paris, but it is southwest of the city, while we were staying to the east. Talking over breakfast, we discovered that each of us thought the other really wanted to go to Versailles, but neither of us cared enough to warrant getting back in the car. So we bailed. I…
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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…
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Grasse and Saint Tropez
After our adventure driving in to Italy, and driving to Nice the day before, we decided to spend less time in the car and stay a bit closer to home for a couple of days. We looked at the nearby towns, and decided it would be fun to check out the charming hillside town of Grasse. Grasse is known for their perfume, which Carey wanted to get as a Christmas gift for her nieces. It dripped a bit on us, but never really rained enough to justify the umbrella we were carrying. I love the narrow cobblestone streets, with little art galleries, perfumeries, restaurants, and boutiques. What I didn’t really…
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Meme Monday – Dreaming of France
Allow me to bore you a bit with the plans that my cousin Carey and I have for our upcoming trip to France. We are leaving on Friday, September 9th, and coming home on Monday, September 26th. We are both SO EXCITED, and dreaming of France and the things we will see and do is a lot of fun. Our first week will be in the South of France, in a small village called Mougins. This is where the time share is, and looking online, it looks like a picturesque place. We fly through Paris, into Nice. Hopefully our baggage will make it, as we are taking a chance and…
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Thankful Thoughts
Blog friend Jonathan wrote a nice post the other day about things he was thankful for at that moment in time. I like the idea of setting aside the obvious things like family and so on, and concentrating on the more immediate things. Here, then, are 5 things I am thankful for right now. I am thankful that we were able to procure COVID-19 at home tests, so that when Maya started feeling kind of crummy, she took a test. Not thankful that the results were positive, but thankful that she found out quickly. I am thankful for the vaccines, including the booster, that we were able to get. I…
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T is for Tree
Our first trip to Hawaii was in 2005, the same year that I started my blog. There are no pictures of that trip here, because we went to Hawaii in June, and I started my blog in November. One thing that amazed me was the Banyan Tree near the Waikiki aquarium. California is not tropical, and I had never seen a Banyan Tree. Banyan trees are not native to Hawaii, they were brought from India, where, according to this site, Banyan is a derivative of the word ‘Banya’, which means merchant in the Gujarati language of India, where Banyan trees provided much needed shade for merchants selling their wares. …
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S is for Smokey
When I was very small, my brother Richard was my hero, and he was my curator for what was good and interesting in the world. What Richard wanted, I wanted. Then my mom and my Great Aunt Flo went to Yosemite for a little vacation, and my mom wanted to bring us gifts home. She saw some tom-toms that would be perfect for Richard, but there was only one set at the gift shop. She looked around, distressed, not sure what to get for me. She settled on a stuffed Smokey Bear. I never looked back. Smokey was my absolute Best Friend. I took him everywhere. I was, however, very…
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Q is for Quote – (Semi) Wordless Wednesday