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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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Wordless Wednesday
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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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Wordless Wednesday
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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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Wordless Wednesday
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Mulder Update
I thought I’d let you know that Mulder is now 1 month in to his 6 month treatment plan. He was a little lethargic and had some tummy issues after the first treatment, but they gave us medication for that. Since then, he has been his normal happy self, no problems other than he is losing weight (but still eating normally), and that generally resolves itself soon enough, so our vet is not worried about it. She said his numbers are all looking good, he is responding well to treatment. One more month of weekly appointments, then the next four months will be every other week, and then he will…
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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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Pictures from France – Cannes, Nice, and Italy
(I thought I was just putting captions under my pictures above, but it looks like regular text to me. So consider those captions, and the paragraph below the beginning of the actual post, please, and I will do better with my next post. WordPress keeps changing things on me, and I don’t post often enough to keep up!) I’m home now, and finally able to post a bit more. The WordPress interface on my iPad was annoying the hell out of me, so I gave up, though I originally had a goal of posting here every day, at least a picture or two, to share my journey with you. Instead,…
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Pictures of Mougins
Cannes was lovely, we put our feet into the sea, did a little shopping, and mostly people watched. Perhaps at some point WordPress will allow me to add more pictures to this post, but I’m not holding my breath.
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Day 2 – Mougins and Cannes
Something weird happened with yesterday’s post (including the fact that I thought I had saved it, not published it, but I guess while I do not have jet lag, my blog clearly does). I will try to edit that post, but my first attempt failed miserably, so am just forging ahead. Today was day 2 or 3 of our trip, since you lose a day traveling, I don’t know. Or you could say day 1 of our vacation, since it was our first full day in France. We are in a little town near Cannes, called Mougins. Again, my computer or blog is being weird, so this is the only…
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Day 1, bookends
Today we started our day with a dog walk, then going to the airport and getting ready for our flight to France. A LONG day later (over 9 hours for the flight, then rental car and drive to hotel etc), we are finally where we are meant to be, with two very happy cousins. Here are our pictures..