We had a truly wonderful sixteen day trip to France, made possible in part by cashing in ten years of frequent flyer miles. We had a lot of Claude Monet (in Giverny, Rouen and three different museums in Paris), a lot of D-Day (Omaha and Utah Beaches, an American and a German cemetery and several museums), six glorious Loire Valley chateaux (Aizy-le-Rideau, Chambord, Chenonceaux, Amboise, Chaumont and Cheverny), Leonardo's tomb and last house (Amboise), some World Cup antics (I watched the Russia-Argentina penalty kicks courtesy of Johanna via Face-Timing her television), four full days in Paris and best of all for me, two of the most transcendentally beautiful holy places I will ever see, Mont Saint-Michel and the massive Chartres Cathedral.
We had interesting hotels and great meals. We drank rosè at every dinner. We went up and down endless spiral and irregular stairs and did a great deal of walking. Just about every Loire Valley chateau figured in a very long-running complicated feud between Catherine deMedici, a queen of France, and Diane de Poitiers, the king's mistress. I still can't figure it all out. We saw other Gothic masterpieces in Rouen, Bayeux and St-Chapelle in Paris. (Notre-Dame in Paris was ridiculously mobbed and we left.) The Bayeux Tapestry is not a tapestry but an embroidery.
Our rental car's navigation system made some weird decisions and spoke with a proper English accent, and Janet named her Clementine, in honor of Winston Churchill's wife. We also experienced ample amounts of today's travel headaches: long delays at airports both ways, uncomfortable flights (why do they even bother to serve such awful food?), glitches on everything technological, a card problem with our bank, crowded Metro cars in Paris (Parisians still do not use deodorant). The weather was much hotter than the forecasts had predicted, but we had no rain on any day, thank goodness for that. When we spoke with people from England, or Belgium or Canada, their subject was, well, you-know-who, which was annoying (I usually answered "I'm on vacation," but we couldn't avoid the subject altogether).
The French:
- are polite drivers, who obey speed limits
- have well-maintained roads
- have way too many narrow roads
- do not rush meals, which in the U.S. would be called "poor service"
- will not bring you a meal check until you ask for it; it's considered an insulting request to leave if you are given the check without asking
- tolerate many many rude tourists
- are much more polite than their reputation
- do not believe in shower curtains
- believe in hand-held showers
- actually understood my French! (well, mostly)
It was the fifth time in France for each of us. We've seen all but a small portion. What made this trip work was planning, and not trying to do too much, so that it was relaxing and we were never in a hurry. About 75% of the trip went as planned and the rest are now stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment