Dublin

Flew to Dublin on Tues and landed in a downpour which continued all day. We still took the bus and went into town (we stayed at the airport so we could get up a little later to catch our plane) to look around. Of course, it was pretty dismal looking through the rain, but the next day’s sunshine helped considerably. We took the hop-on, hop-off bus tour and enjoyed just riding and seeing what Dublin had to offer. It was a crash visit here, and we’ll definitely return, so we didn’t feel short-changed by it. So, tomorrow it is that we’ll be home (said with an Irish lilt) and we’re ready for a rest. We had a great trip and thank all of you who took the time to read my blog. Special thanks to Vladimir who talked me into writing one several trips ago and to Nate who showed me how to do the photos.

So, off we’ll go to Mukilteo tomorrow and start planning our next trip which, by the way, is a return to Australia in January with a stop in Fiji on the way. We hope all of you will continue to travel with us; we always enjoy your emails which keep us connected to home.

Paris

The Orsay had been closed for renovation the last time I was in Paris with my mom back in 2001, so getting there was my one and only major desire. Since we weren’t spending too much time (only Sat afternoon, Sun and Mon morning) there, I knew we’d have to see it on Sunday, and, lucky for us, it was the first Sunday of the month which meant it was free to enter. So, we planned on being there when it first opened and were only 15 minutes late because of a street closure on our way. Having just come from Monet’s home in Giverny, we were especially keen to see his paintings, and there was a whole room full of them. Delightful. We took our time, looked at each one, and were allowed to take photos, so we spent quite a bit of time just in this room. It was really neat to see his house and gardens painted in several of his masterpieces and know that the green bench was the same one that we had sat on just the day before.

There was also a whole room dedicated to Van Gogh, and since we had stayed in Arles, which had been his residence for many of his paintings, we spent a majority of our total time looking at some of the work that he had done while living there. We also got to see many masterpieces of Renoir, Manet, Monet, Picasso, and Cezanne. In fact, we spent all of our time in the Impressionist galleries and left only because we had met a gentleman while we were visiting our friends Terry and Ann, and he had invited us to his apartment when we got to Paris.

So, Jean-Pierre picked us up at 3, took us around to see various sections of town, and then ended up at his apartment for drinks. The building had been constructed in 1910 and looked beautifully preserved. We didn’t realize it earlier, but he had been instrumental in maintaining the historical integrity of the building when it had been renovated in the 1990’s. We knew that he had been the head of an organization specifically to keep the historical character of many homes in the Figeac area, but we didn’t know that he had had a hand in planning the renovations of some buildings in Paris as well. After we toured his apartment, had our drinks, and saw his 200 pieces of art displayed, he dropped us off at Montmartre. This is a hill which has a beautiful church, Sacre Coeur, surrounded by a small village of restaurants and artists and thousands of tourists! It’s the highest point in Paris, so it’s pretty popular at sunset. But it had started to rain and proceeded to come down by the bucketfuls, so we cut our visit short and went back to our hotel area for dinner.

On Monday we had reservations in Beauvais, a town about 50 miles north of Paris, which services Ryan Air, the cheap European airline we used to get back to Dublin. So, we bid au revoir to Paris and got on the train after lunch in order to have a little time there to celebrate my birthday. Terry found a sweet little restaurant that served traditional French cuisine, and we had a wonderful dinner with French champagne and some really funny French people at the next table who kept trying to talk to us in French. Of course, we couldn’t understand everything they said (earlier I had mentioned that both of us together could remember only enough French to fit in a drop of spit, and it was even more true now). Their solution was to speak more loudly and use their hands to try to get their point across which, of course, called more attention to our ignorance. Next time we will have to do better, but this time we giggled and laughed all the way back to the hotel.

Giverny

It was almost dark when we drove into Giverny, and the town was having a music fest (we were hoping for classical, but it was rock and roll) so all the roads into town were blocked. Bummer. We figured we’d have a terrible time finding our hotel, but we saw the street name after just one turn around, and drove right to it. What a sweet house! Monsieur and Madame Bonchard decided to rent out a couple of their rooms, and we were lucky to have found it on the internet. We unloaded our bags and set out for town to have dinner. We found a restaurant with a bunch of French tourists, but we had a nice meal and wound our way back to the hotel at about 10. We were so tired we didn’t even hear the rock and roll concert that was only about 2 blocks away. The next morning we woke up early, had breakfast in their little porch area and strolled off to see the house and garden of Claude Monet. We entered via the gardens and stood, stunned at all the colorful flowers. There were thousands of them, in all different colors and sizes and would have been almost aglow if the sun had been out. But at least it wasn’t raining, and we were grateful for that, especially when we crossed under the road to his lily pad garden with those famous bridges. We visited his house, cozy, warm and inviting. I loved the exterior most of all; it was pink with green trim, very cheerful, and quite the perfect backdrop for all the flowers. He even had chickens and turkeys, evidently, because we not only saw them at his home but also in one of his paintings at the Museum Orsay in Paris of this house with turkeys as the main focus.

Bayeux and Arromanches

This cute little town saw some major fighting during WWII because it was right on the D-Day invasion track. We got there a little late because we stopped in Bayeux to see the tapestry that told the story of William the Conqueror’s Battle of Hastings in 1066. It was made out of wool thread on a very long linen cloth (70 yards long). It was so intricate that I kept looking at the expressions on the horses’ faces and all the different clothing that was on the solders and the maidens not really believing that this amazing piece of cloth could have survived for the number of centuries that it did. Incredibly, the museum allowed photos, so I took an inordinate number of pictures. There were 71 scenes and each of them as beautiful and colorful as it would be had it been sewn today. I wonder where it was hidden during the war. I’ll have to see if I can find that on the computer.

We drove to the little town of Arromanches on the English Channel to see the D-Day beaches or as much as we could in the time we had. First we went to the 360 degree theater and saw a very interesting telling of the war. While they were showing present day video of the town, they were also showing what occurred during the D-Day invasion. Pretty amazing and stunning comparisons! Then we walked along the beach area, or actually high up on the cliffs. Unbelievable that the allies could scale those cliffs and take out the German Army. We drove along the coast between Omaha and Gold Beaches and saw so many iron and metal parts of ships, sunken blocking debris, and parts of the giant wall that was built left over from the war. The Normandy American Cemetery farther down the coast in Colleville was remarkably beautiful despite the reminder of the thousands of lives lost in just a few days, and we walked around in silence. Having spent so much time on WWII in my US history classes made me appreciate a little more, perhaps, the terrible times so many of the WWII veterans who visited with my students had to endure. I am even more grateful.


Getting out of the Normandy area and finding the autoroute was confusing; we talked about the difficulty of the troops who had been fighting here in finding their way from town to town. It’s like a huge maze with little roads going this way and that, and signs are plentiful, for sure, but they are villages with 100 people, maybe, and not knowing the small towns around us, we easily got lost and drove in circles for awhile. Then we caught sight of somewhere we recognized, and we were off to Giverny.

Mont St. Michele

Incredible, amazing, majestic--all took on a new meaning when we caught sight of Mont St. Michel in the afternoon sun. We could begin to see it from about 20 miles away, and it kept getting bigger as we got closer. Then we were there, and we could see the details of the city walls, the houses at the base of the abbey, and the very tall and stately abbey, itself. On our tour of the abbey, we learned that it was begun in the 700’s as a pilgrimage site by the Bishop of Avranches and was frequented by French royalty which made it even more popular with successive church hierarchy and those with money to spare who continued to add to it through the ages. This made it into more than a church but also into a fortress which sits on a very small island on the northwest coast of France. The tides measure up to 50 feet, and at low tide, the water recedes about 5 miles which allows visitors to walk out onto the mud flats if they dare. We kept seeing warning signs of quicksand (which convinced me that I wasn’t going to do it) and a fast tidal bore that is said to move at the speed of a galloping horse (a little hyperbole, I think). We had reserved a room on the island inside the walls and were so glad we did. After dinner, we walked around the island on the ramparts of the fortress, and then we walked out onto the manmade causeway that connects it with the mainland. We both turned at the same time to view it in floodlight and drew a deep breath; it was magic! The lights gave it a heavenly glow, and the very upper part of the abbey took on a shiny purple hue. St. Michel, bathed in gold, sat on a very tall spire at the top. Many photos later, we tore ourselves away from the vision and scuttled around the darkened town, imagining all sorts of scenarios from Roman times or the Dark Ages. Exhausted, we finally crossed over the drawbridge into the village and went to bed hoping that some fair maiden would spin straw into gold for us so we could pay our hotel bill!