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!

Red Sparkle Shoes

This picture is from the archives. I recently finished a project for my new digital class that is teaching me how to change a picture to sepia and bring the color back for part of it. I pulled up this picture of Lauren from when she was three and it reminded me of how much she loved those red sparkly shoes!

This picture is from last week. She sure has grown, but still has the same pretty smile!

Day 6-8 Europe Trip - Loire Valley

Welcome to days 6-8 of our vacation!

But first, some of you have asked about the book publishing I've mentioned here & there. You can see what we've been up to by visiting http://www.integralarchive.org/vie-books.htm, but to make a long story short several hundred admirers of the author Jack Vance spent years collecting, digitizing, restoring and publishing his oeuvre in a 44-volume integral edition. Some 600 book sets were printed for subscribers world-wide, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (who has has declared Vance to be his favorite author) along with much less glamorous people like me. If you visit integralarchive be sure to click on the 'First Chapters' link to see what all the fuss was about!

A monthly electronic newsletter called Cosmopolis accompanied the Vance Integral Edition (VIE) project. The newsletters provided progress updates, essays on Vance's work, and discussion of various topics via letters-to-the-editor. After publication of the book sets was finished, some of the VIE volunteers resolved to publish the newsletters as well; this is what I was discussing with Stefania Zacco and Sr. Giuseppe Biffi in Milan.

The Editor-in-Chief of the VIE is an expatriate American painter and sculptor named Paul Rhoads who lives near the western Loire town of Chinon. After savoring the sights, sounds and--yes!--tastes of the Italian Riviera, Margaret and I made our way back to Milan by train and caught a flight to Paris. From there we rented a car and perigrinated to Chinon to visit Paul, with only a slight unintentional detour through the crowded fringes of Paris at rush-hour.

Roses surround the door to Paul's cottage in Sammarcolles, ten kilometers south of Chinon. The gargoyle perched on the wall is an original creation, and fully functional.

In connection with our visit we had Paul paint portraits of Margaret and me. Here Paul studies Margaret's classical good looks in his studio; the fortunate canvas stands ready.

The first few strokes...

Voila! Soft background, engmatic smile: a modern Mona Lisa.

Here is the painting of me taking shape. Sitting for a portrait is more than a little disconcerting. The artist peers from around his canvas: squinting, grimacing, muttering. The subject sits on a chair still as a statue for hours. If he has tilted his head to the right slightly more than is comfortable for a three-hour period, too bad! The tilt must be maintained, sore neck muscles notwithstanding. All the while the subject wonders about the flare of his nostrils, the conspicuousness of his double chin, the latitude of his hair-line. And he is acutely aware that there is no Photoshop for oil paintings. But for us it all came out well in the end.

The happy couple drying in famous Loire Valley sunlight.

In between sessions in the studio we visited Chateau du St. Louand, the childhood home of Paul's French wife Genevieve. St. Louand sits on several park-like acres a few kms outside Chinon. We four ambled through the gardens and admired the irises that Genevieve, also a painter, can bring to life so well with her brushes.

The vinyards of St. Louand are said to produce some of the best red wine in the Loire, though we did not put this claim to the test!

A typical street in Chinon. Margaret and I spent an enchanting few hours strolling through the town and exploring the fortress on the bluff above it.

Flower boxes on Rue Voltaire.

This may well be the world's most beautiful public restroom. Through the arched doorway an ancient tunnel delves beneath the battlements--you can just make out the top of the crenellated fortress wall above the trees. The commode occupies the first twenty feet or so of the tunnel, beyond which a wrought iron grate blocks further entry (at least to restroom patrons; ghosts, apparently, can pass through into the darkness at will.) A fragrant, flowering tree spreads across the cobblestone courtyard; in the early 15th century the first French parliament met on the upper floor of the building to the left. Such impressive atmosphere more than compensates for a complete lack of toilet paper.

Ramparts of the fortress, or 'Chateau du Chinon'.

A view of Chinon and the placid Vienne river from the fortress. Chinon is a quiet backwater now but it once was the capital from which Henry II ruled all of England and France. A few years later, in 1429, a young farm-girl named Joan of Arc came to Chinon and inspired Charles VII to eject the English from their country. The town seems frozen in time, a maze of cobblestone streets and medieval buildings, their slate roofs and white limestone walls a marked contrast to the Cinque Terre's vibrant pastels.

The French do not produce great ice-cream, but their bakeries are world class. This is the display case of a particularly charming boulangerie/patisserie on Rue Voltaire in Chinon. The language barrier turns out not to be a problem: you simply point at various confections and say "un" at each one, the girl behind the counter wraps your selections and piles the lot into a large paper bag, you hand over a strangely-colored bill and get a few odd coins in return, and everyone is happy!

Celebrating Margaret's birthday at an outdoor table.

The excessively charming village of Marcay (pron. 'mar-say'), half-way between Chinon and our host's cottage.

Chateau du Marcay. Locals apply the term 'chateau' to the largest house in a given town, so while some of the Loire chateaux are huge and extravagant--'palaces' in every sense of the word--some, like St. Louand, are really just large country homes.

Paul made this lovely painting of a rose plucked from the bush by his door. Margaret complimented the painting, and Paul generously made her a gift of it for her birthday.

An evening view of Paul's comfortable cottage, and of the table and chairs beneath the Linden tree where we spent many pleasant hours munching cheese and contemplating "our pathways of golden glory down the fading corridors of time." (Jack Vance, Lurulu)

Next: we trade the pastoral climes of Chinon for Paris' bustling elegance.

Day 5 Europe Trip- Cinque Terre

Here is a map of the Cinque Terre. The towns are connected by road and rail, and more charmingly by a hiking path. Our plan was to hike from Vernazza to Monterosso, then train down to Riomaggiore and hike back up the coast to Vernazza. Signs posted along the trail measure distances in estimated hiking times, but I think it's about seven miles from Monterosso to Riomaggiore. Isn't that fun to say? 'Riomaggiore..'

Up early on Monday to attack the trail to Monterosso! Er, that is, we slept shamefully late, ate a hedonistic breakfast and ambled along, stopping as frequently as we possibly could. And with views like this one who wouldn't stop every 15-20 feet?

Here is Margaret, exhibiting her shapely legs on a set of old stone stair-steps.

Here is Greg, next to a sign.

There is almost no level ground on this portion of the Italian coast, so farmers have spent centuries building terraces along the hills and headlands. An official-looking placard at the Vernazza train station claims that there is as much stone in Cinque Terre terrace walls as in the entire Great Wall of China. An impressive statistic, though I'm glad I was not the one counting all the stones. Most of the terraces support grapes. I also saw apricots, berries, various herbs and assorted vegetables being grown. Here and there a patch of hard-won terrace ground has been given over to flowers, apparently out of sheer whimsy.

On final approach to Monterosso-al-Mare, hike destination #1. As you can see the coast is a collection of fractal-like headlands and coves, one right after the other. The train tracks do not 'follow' the serrated coastline per se, rather they plunge through a procession of tunnels, some of which are quite long. This makes a train ride along the Cirque Terre much less scenic than one might imagine.

Margaret at her ease with another of Italy's ubiquitous gelaterias. This is not the gelateria where the infamous pistachio gelato was purchased; that one is across the street. I don't blame the Italians for having so many gelaterias in their towns. If American ice-cream was as good as Italian gelato, I would insist on there being a gelateria on every corner here, too.

Margaret, looking surprisingly cheerful for someone who has just been robbed of a bowl of pistachio gelato.

At the Monterosso train station waiting for a ride back to the other end of the Cinque Terre. You have to be on your toes at Italian train stations, even the small ones. Signs are posted indicating which binario (platform) a train will arrive at/depart from, but this is constantly changing and PA announcements of changes are not given--or repeated--in English. So you have to listen intently to something like "bublabublabublabinariobublabubla" and then scramble to figure out the new binario before the train arrives...and leaves again. Since not all trains stop at all train stations, it is possible to get on a train going in the proper direction but wind up in Genoa or La Spezia instead. :-/

More of the impossibly lovely Ligurian coast.

A Roman-esque retaining wall between Riomaggiore and Manarola. This is the so-called "Via del Amore", or Path of Love. It, ah, seemed to work just fine for us!

Manarola. There are boats all over the place in this little village, parked along the harbor front and parallel-parked on both sides of the main street. I do not recall whether or not there are parking meters for boats in Manarola, but if not, it would be a good idea and someone should suggest it to the city council.

A distant view of the hill-top village of Corniglia. The storm clouds visible on the horizon foiled our plan to hike the rest of the way to Vernazza, sending us scrambling to Corniglia's train station instead.

Back in Vernazza, my poor attempt to impersonate James Dean is observed with disdain by a local resident, who, being Italian, and being a cat, possesses a style and savoire-faire I can only dream about.

Dinner the last night in Vernazza. The ladies behind us turned out to be a group of vacationing school-teachers from Salt Lake City. They volubly enjoyed their meal and each other's company, and gave us a hard time for being BYU alums.

More to come....