Europe Trip - Day 9 to Day 13...and Home Again

En route to Paris we stopped to visit the chateau of Azay-le-Rideau, a grand chateau from the early French Renaissance (ca. 1520) built on an island in the Indre river. The place was designed and built by Francois I's treasurer Gilles Berthelot, who apparently covered some of the costs by embezzling state funds! When Francois discovered this he promptly confiscated the chateau and gave it to one of his generals. A very impressive building but I'd hate to pay the heating bills.

Margaret peering up the stairwell in the Hotel Champ du Mars, Paris.

Feeling very small beneath le Tour Eiffel.

Slim, graceful and beautiful. And the tower's not half bad either.

On Rue Cler, the bustling, mostly pedestrian avenue outside our hotel. Within a few dozen steps of the hotel door are several restaurants, boulangeries (bakeries), patisseries (pastry shops), fromageries (cheese shops), miniature grocery stores, clothing boutiques, bookstores, etc. A fun place to spend an evening.

A basket of dough-nuts in a Rue Cler Patisserie. Margaret made a substantial dent in the pile after taking the photo. [Margaret's edit- "I had three, but I probably could have 'dented' the pile if I had tried."]


When Meg and I were in Paris in 1996 we carefully avoided the Louvre, afraid that so much concentrated beauty would short-out our synapses. This time around we mustered the courage to visit and have experienced no untoward effects--yet.

We arrived some 20 minutes before the gates opened and waited in line with scores and then hundreds of museum-goers. When finally we were all ushered through the metal detectors, one young Asian woman lost her head and sprinted down the hall to the ticket counters, handbag bouncing and swinging on its strap.

Part of the apartments on Napoleon III, preserved in all their splendor. Being Emperor of the Second French Empire was not a bad gig, apparently.

That small, dark painting way in the background is the Mona Lisa. I never got a close look at it, but for my part there are dozens of more interesting paintings in the Louvre, and frankly the swarms of worshipful tourists were more striking than painting itself (apologies to Leonardo.)

A busker on the Paris metro. Busking is prohibited in the English tube system but quite common in Paris, and many of the musicians are surprisingly good. The acoustics in those arched tunnels do wonderful things to the sound of a single violin playing classical music; a walk through a dank, poorly lit tunnel is transformed into a cultural experience. In England we just heard rowdy soccer fans.

A nameless cathedral outside a creperie where we lunched after visiting the Louvre. I had a very hard time with French menus. Once I accidentally ordered a plateful of rubbery goose livers soaked in vinegar. Some say French cuisine is the best in the world, but a fat lot of good that does when YOU CAN'T READ THE MENU AND THE WAITRESS WON'T TRANSLATE IT! End of rant.



A not-so-nameless cathedral on the Seine's Ile-de-la-Cite. Thousands of tourists and pilgrims surrounded the place when we arrived, as they doubtless have done for centuries. While scrutinizing it I realized that however much the Catholic church spent to build Notre Dame, it was, at least economically speaking, a very good investment!

Paris is chock-full of famous monuments. We took the metro to the Arc de Triomphe and walked back down the Champs-Elysees to the Tuileries gardens. The Champs-Elysees was underwhelming: glitzy and over-commercialized, we couldn't even afford to use the public restroom we came across. Still, an interesting place to go window-shopping, or 'window-licking' as they say in France.

Monet's Water Lilies in the Orangerie Museum are a breath of fresh air for overstimulated and footsore tourists. The main floor consists of two oval-shaped rooms built specifically to house Monet's eight large water lily canvases. The calm setting, soft natural light and curving walls complement the paintings perfectly...it's not often you see a museum designed around a group of paintings and the effect is remarkable.

With the sun going down on our vacation we stopped by the Eiffel Tower one more time. We'd heard that the lights were 'turned on' at the top of every hour at night, but the tower was lit when we arrived and I wondered what the ballyhoo was about until we saw this:

Thanks for sharing our vacation with us...au revoir for now!