THE GREAT EUROPEAN (WELL, LONDON AND PARIS AT LEAST) TRIP TAKEN BY RHONDA AND ERIN

Welcome!

This is going to be long.

A few things to note before I begin:

Thursday, April 29th

I drove up to Atlanta Thursday evening just before dusk.  The plan was:  go to George's, spend the night, and go to work the next day with George because he works at the airport, leaving my car at his apartment.

The only reason I'm mentioning Thursday at all is that I had the windows open that day as I was packing to leave, and I heard these babies chirping at me from outside:



That's the stand of bamboo that grows along the line of parked cars.  Don't be fooled by their frightened appearance; they were screeching for food right up to the point where I was three feet away, taking their photo, and they commenced to screeching for food again the instant I backed off to get into the car.  My apartment window is thirty feet away and on the second floor, and not only could I hear them from inside, they were loud.  One wonders how the species survives predation.

Anyway, cute (loud) baby birds.  Then I drove to Atlanta.



Friday, April 30th:  Underway

Notes I took while sitting at Hartsfield
There are a number of little services I offer to anybody who hosts me in their domicile.  For instance, if you let me use your shower, I will always face all of your products so that the labels can be read.  I will also give your microwave oven a quick steam-cleaning, because I have to microwave my cactus face cloth to keep it from growing its own cultures when I pack it away damp from showering.  I provide these amenities free of charge, and I'm considering laying up a supply of chocolates so that I can start doing turn-down service as well.

Also, sorry about the product facing thing, it's just something I have to do.

I'm chillin in Hartsfield Concourse D right now, taking advantage of Pillar Power (there are large round pillars with outlets in them, I have my laptop plugged in).  It's a beautiful day outside, not a cloud in the sky.  I made it through check-in like a pro, because I had a pro's advice to call upon; George was with me right up to the line.  Chapstick safe in my pocket, and I even put my carry-on through without spilling my peanut butter M&M's.  I also have Cheez-its.  I only allow myself Cheez-its when I travel.

Listening to "Flagpole Sitta" right now and contemplating the paid wireless internet.  I'm not sick but I'm not welllll...  At 4pm, George will meet me here and we can have lunch.  Rank hath its privileges.  He's not merely an employee of TSA, he's a managerial type what wears a tie and collar, and if you ask me, he's turning into something of a style maven these days.

I'm going to braid my hair before it dries completely, and then I'll be full-on travel-ready.  Anybody who thinks hair braiding is unfashionable has never tried an all-day drive or flight with long, naturally curly hair.

I'm sleepy, and I hope that bodes well for being able to sleep on the flight to Heathrow.  My flight at 5:35pm today is to Philly, which is where I'm meeting Mom.

4pm:  achieved lunch with George.  Subs from Quiznos.  He got a chicken carbonara, I got a mesquite chicken, we got confused and end up eating each other's sandwiches.  Both were tasty, so it's all good.
The short flight from Atlanta to Philly was uneventful; I spent the trip looking out at the moon.  I didn't sleep.  I was foolishly attempting to stay awake so that I would be sure to sleep on the flight to London.  I had yet to learn the First Lesson of the Trip to Europe:  When possible, sleep.



Notes I took while sitting in the Philadelphia airport
I'm in the Philly airport right now.  By a twist of flight dynamics, I landed just before Mom did, and after trying and failing to reach her by phone, I made the trek from C terminal all the way to A22 before realizing she wasn't there.  When I tried calling again, she was still in C terminal.  I advised her that if she wanted food she should get it on the way, because having made it to A, I was doing my best to implant myself into the cushiony waiting area seats for the foreseeable future.  I have my two shoulder bag carryons... they both hook to the rolling suitcase (now checked into baggage and hence unavailable for this purpose) and when they do, it's no big deal carrying all three.  When I have them on my shoulders, it's not no big deal.  It's deal.  Very deal.  Ow.

(Here I've been running and walking all week long in preparation for the trip, when clearly I should have been pumping pig iron.)

The dusk is hazing over with darkness outside, and on the flight up, the plane drifted along in the thick red shield dividing the earth from the sky, never rising above it, so I never saw the clouds from above.  I think a part of it is the warm weather.  It may have been smog.
Met with Mom and we noshed and had a snack, and then she went and changed some dollars into pounds, as we were anticipating... drumroll, please... The Bank Holiday!  Oh, yes.  This will come up again.

The money exchange went without a hitch, which was the last time we could say that about anything that happened the entire trip.

We weren't sitting for long before we noticed a rather long and somewhat Important Looking line queuing up in front of the flight attendant's desk.  We discussed it with the other seated passengers; should we be in the line?  Is it an Important Line or a Mandatory Line?  Will they let us on the plane if we just sit here?

We eventually got into the line, and as it turned out, it was necessary for something that needed to be done to the passports, though for the life of me I can't recall what.  Lesson 5 of the Trip to Europe:  Always have your passport handy, because some clerk somewhere wants to do something to it at all times.

And then, why, we were on the flight to Heathrow.



The flight over was quite an experience.  The food was good (that would be my first experience with the chicken dinner hobby kit), and the seats were slightly roomier and more comfortable than on a domestic flight, but otherwise...  Yes, it was exciting and fun in that "OMG we're going to Europe!" kind of way, but otherwise, let me just say this:  Lesson 3 of the trip to Europe is take a sleeping pill on international flights.  It is not a suggestion.  If you don't do this, you will be miserable.

We didn't take a sleeping pill.

We did, however, spend much of the evening browsing our already well-perused copies of Rick Steves' London and Paris.  Lesson 1 of the trip to Europe:  Rick Steves' guides are the Bible.  Don't leave home without them.

In fact, just about the only thing that Rick Steves' was wrong about was when he told us that May 1st was a big holiday in Paris, but not so much in London, and that hence we would not have to worry about... The Bank Holiday!



Saturday, May 1st:  Hailing from London

I got more sleep than Mom did, and still I felt like I was watching the night pass.  Flying at a higher elevation than I was accustomed to... I was impressed by the way the condensation trapped between the window panels frosted over in the night:



We crossed over into Europe (and while we were at it, crossed into Saturday morning) watching the dawn rise to meet us.  It was late morning, London time, when we got our first view of the Old World.



I was curious about the round white thing.

London came into focus just then:



We touched down and were spit out into Heathrow bedraggled, weary, and confused, but unbowed... we had our Rick Steve's book, we had a nice adrenaline rush, and we had our good intentions to fight the jet lag by staying awake ALL DAY LONG.

We were quite stressed out by the idea of Customs, as neither of us had ever negotiated it before.  Helpfully enough, once we retrieved our luggage, the Customs area was clearly marked.  We rolled through the curtained-off area surreptitiously looking around, went in the direction saying "Nothing to declare" and passed by a couple of passengers who were digging through their bags in front of attendants at tables.  Before we knew it, we had gone all the way through Customs without anybody so much as calling out the Royal Guard after us or any claxons sounding in our wake.  I looked at Mom and she looked at me.  "I feel like we just got away with something."

"I know.  Let's hurry before we get caught."

Lesson 112 of the Trip to Europe:  Customs is totally not a big deal.

We had an array of choices for getting from Heathrow to our hotel (the Hilton Kensington), but the clear favorite from friends I'd asked advice of was to take the Paddington Express and taxi or tube from there.

So, clinging fast to the words of friends in my head, I declared, "WE MUST TAKE THE PADDINGTON EXPRESS TRAIN."  And we did.



It was fast, comfortable, efficient, and expensive.  We would soon learn this was true of almost all London transport.  Lesson 37 of the Trip to Europe:  When in London, take the Tube and get an Oyster Card the first day.

We didn't get our Oyster Cards until like, day 3.  We would have picked them up upon advice from the tube station clerk on day 1, except for the fact that it was... The Bank Holiday!

We arrived at Paddington Station too weary and baffled to truly appreciate it; over the course of the London leg of our trip, we ended up visiting Paddington a few more times, and it may be my favorite train station now.  London by and large had a very friendly feeling about it, and nowhere did I feel that more than at Paddington Station.  I also really liked the decorative grille windows.


Everyone was thinner than we were

From there we got a taxi to our hotel, and had our first introduction to London's fine taxicabs, which I say absolutely without irony.  The London cabbies were efficient, polite, and plentiful.  We were in one and at the hotel before we could blink, and then we found ourselves in the Hilton Kensington, three hours before check-in.

The Hilton was merciful to us and allowed us into the room at noon, and so Mom and I got a chance to shower, fall on the beds and say, "OOF," have our various coffee and tea, unpack, and force ourselves back out into the wild lest we fall asleep and make our jetlag even worse than we already suspected it was going to be.  Lesson 15 from the Trip to Europe:  it's true what they say, stay awake the first day if you can, the first day is the worst. This was the view from our room:



The most important part of the room:



I would like to take a moment to mention, with great reverence and gratitude, the hotel kettle provided us by Hilton.  That thing was awesome.  You could fill it to the brim, hit the switch, and it would boil the water within two minutes.  If you didn't lift it from the warmer to turn it off, it would boil so fiercely that it steam cleaned the mirror above the coffee/tea service.  I was terribly impressed by that thing, and I so want one now.  Lesson 35 of the Trip to Europe:  always have a ready source of your morning rocket fuel.  I'm making a big deal over the coffee service for a reason; this will come up again later.

Outside the hotel were several cute little fountain sculptures:



We had a short walk down the street, and I recall these trees because I thought they were very striking:



Still not sure what they were.

Notes I took regarding the first day
First day went on bus tour, got hailed on.
Okay, let's stop right there and go into a little more detail.  April 30th in London is apparently no joke, there was a reason we were aiming slightly off-season.  We knew that you couldn't visit London without taking one of the much-vaunted Red Bus tours, and we furthermore knew that the tour should preferably be taken on the first day as a handy introduction to the city sights.  So it seemed a cinch that the best way to stay awake and chipper was to take a tour.  Right?  Right?

Well, we got a late start as we had already unpacked, rested a little, and gone to lunch a couple of blocks away at a quirky little place called Giraffe.  It's not actually true what they say, that you can't get good food in London; it would be closer to the truth to say that it's hard to get English food in London.  We ate foreign food half the time we were there.  We also puttered around a little, getting used to the notion of being in Kensington.

So we didn't get on the bus until about 5pm.  Still; plenty of daylight left, despite the heavy gray clouds and chilly air.  Mom and I donned our raincoats...

A word about the raincoats:  We purchased them a few weeks before the trip.  Two fairly inexpensive raincoats of a lovely soft synthetic that nonetheless repelled water as efficiently as a tarp.  They were just thin enough to wear in a warm rain, and just thick enough to wear in a cool rain provided you kept a layer or two underneath.  Well-fitted with pockets and lined in satiny fabric, Mom and myself sported our shiny new coats in aqua and leaf green colors, respectively.  We matched!  It was too cute, and touristy!  After all, what's the point in being tourists if you can't be touristy?  Thus we equipped ourselves, you know, just in case it rained.


Ain't we just the cutest?

Little did we know...

For the duration of our trip, we lived in those raincoats.

Those raincoats were our inseparable companions.

Those raincoats saved our pitiful, unprepared lives.

Those raincoats were our refuge and our beacon in the howling maelstrom that was... April weather in London.

So anyway, cutely matching in our little pastel coats, we hopped on the train, wheee!

The tour guide was a plucky young woman whose patter was both interesting and humorous.  We saw the London Eye, some arches, a few statues, some bridges.  And learned many things.

Things learned on the bus tour:
  • London is the city of Hilton hotels, and we happened to pick the one farthest from everything.
  • The namesake of Saint Thomas Hospital was killed supposedly by accident, when soldiers took the words of a king a little too seriously.  The king apologized.  "My bad.  I didn't know the dudes with the swords were listening."
  • The Thames is much cleaner than it used to be.  There are fish now.
  • The sphinxes by Cleopatra's Needle are facing the wrong way:  out instead of in, where they might protect the obelisk.
  • London Bridge has indeed fallen down a few times.  There was this one time that the Americans actually purchased the old fallen one and with the profits from that the Londoners bought a new one.  (And if you believe that one...)
  • There's a nursing school where Florence Nightingale educated nurses in the basics of modern healthcare, such as not getting slopping drunk before doing surgery.
  • Churchill had two very funny quotes, both of which I've deliberately blocked from my memory.
Let's have the photos, shall we?

Some photos Mom took:



Some photos I took:


this is usually the point where Mom says that my photos are SOOOOO much better than hers -- the fact is, I had a better camera

One thing I want to point out in particular:  THIS!  This is the Marble Arch!


This is TOTALLY the Marble Arch!

It was really close to our hotel.  And it's very important.  I mean, they named an entire Tube stop and neighborhood after it.  We had it pointed out to us about three times on every bus tour.

Now, do you notice the sort of growing darkness in these?  Because so did we.  And the weather did what it looked like it was going to do, sure enough... midway through the tour, it began to rain.  Mom went down into the body of the bus, but I stayed on top because I was going to be stalwart and draw up my raincoat hood and enjoy my first London rain.  The tour guide had plastic over her cap, so she seemed to be okay.  We just kept on touring.  That was when it began to hail on us.

The tour guide said, "I love my job."

I'd prepared for London rain and London fog (hey, they even named a COAT MAKER after London fog), but I wasn't quite up to London hail, so I joined Mom on the lower level.  We window-rubbernecked the best we could and pointed out things we wanted to see for later, and after a while, the hail turned back to rain.  And then...

And then the bus operator declared that their run ended at 6pm, and dumped us unceremoniously out on the sidewalk.  In the rain.  And the evening.  With no idea where in London we might have been dumped, save that it was far, far away from our hotel -- with our beds in it.  Adrenaline had kept us moving so far, but jet lag and sleep deprivation were slowly making us both snarly and easily defeated.

I tried to be positive.  I mean, hey, there's lost and stranded, and then there's lost and stranded in London, which is so much more glamorous.  We puzzled over the bus tour maps and the big London map, trying to figure out whether we were waiting at the right spot for the bus that might consider taking us back to the hotel.  As we stood there, quite a few other tourists began to congregate on the sidewalk with us, all dumped, all forlorn, all getting a little surly.  We waited, as a group.  We puzzled over our maps, as a group.  We discussed our predicament.  Some people wandered off in the direction of another bus (was it the right bus?  Who knew?).

Here's what I did:  I grabbed Mom's arm, gritted my teeth, and said in all caps, "WE ARE GOING TO FIGURE OUT THE TUBE RIGHT THE HELL NOW SO THAT WE DON'T GET STRANDED AGAIN."  And then I dragged her off toward what I thought might be the Tube station.  I believe I was oriented wrong, but we fixed it, and a block or so away there was a Tube sign and we went below.  And though we still didn't have our Oyster cards properly arranged, we managed to at least get back to our stop -- once we figured out, more or less by flipping a coin, which stop was ours.

The Tube was rather difficult to figure out, actually.  We had to puzzle our way past a lot of shutdown tracks... many of them were closed for the weekend, but more of them were closed for... The Bank Holiday!

We found our way back to the hotel eventually, though.  Then we waved our arms at the insanity of the world and collapsed for about ten hours.



Sunday, May 2nd:  London at Random

Sleep was a bit random and disjointed for us that night; I slept from 7:30pm until 12:30 and then was awake until 3am or so, Mom woke up at 5:30am and had a conversation with me that I can not recall at all.  I'm sure that it went something like this:

"Well, it's raining outside."

"Hnnnnnnnnnnghh."

"Are you hungry?"

"Mrrrrrrrrrrrrglle.

"Did you wake up at all last night?  I sure did."

"THE ALIENS JUST TOLD ME THAT IF I DON'T SLEEP FOR ANOTHER HOUR, THEY WILL OBLITERATE THE PLANET."

I don't think I said that last one, but seriously, I was out of it.  I went back to sleep and stayed there until 7am, and that was quite an improvement on 5:30.  I got up, went to our astoundingly splendid little hotel tea service, and had tea.  London tea.  Lovely, beautiful, English tea!

It was to be the first of many lovely tea experiences.

Mom, on a more unfortunate note, is not a tea lover, and apparently tea feels the same way towards her.  She experienced a fairly severe tea-related injury on our first morning in London -- a nasty spill on her ankle that turned into a red welt.  It looked to be a 2nd degree burn.  That hotel room teapot was a SERIOUS piece of hardware, dude.

This was but the beginning of a trend of Bad Things Happening to Mom.  It was a little frightening.  I didn't quite know what to do about it.

Then we went down to breakfast, and oh, my.

The Hilton English breakfast:  an experience not to be missed.  A huge bar full of eggs (even fried ones!) and fried crackling bacon and ham and sausages and fruit and cooked mushrooms and little roasted tomatoes and interesting black disks of some kind of English Thing and various toasts and jams and honeys and marma-things!  And if you asked the waiter, he would bring you American coffee!  Which was a great comfort to Mom.  As for me?  I ordered tea.  And they brought a teapot out, the tea already perfectly steeped and just the right temperature, with a cup.  We both used real cream.  It was an arterial nightmare, but boy was it good.  I even ate a black disk of English Thing, and found it... edible.  The mushrooms were my favorite.  Why don't we serve fried mushrooms with breakfast in the States?  Who can I talk to about getting that done?

Now, the original plan for our first full-length day in London, a lovely empty Sunday, was to meet up with my friend T and have her guide us around and show us the wonderful things.  But UNFORTUNATELY, she couldn't get into town.  Why?  Because the trains weren't running that particular Sunday.  Why?  OH MY OH MY, IT'S The Bank Holiday!

So we were on our own, and fairly disgruntled about it.

We hadn't had much of a bus tour the prior day, and as things stood, one of the tours took us right to several places we wanted to go.  So, fortified with English breakfast and American coffee, we hopped another bus tour and headed for the Tower of London.  In the rain.

But of course we had some other sights to see!  For instance, the Marble Arch!


Look look, it's still the Marble Arch!

We went through the Tower and did what you do; we viewed the historical plaques and coats-of-arms, walls of records, and mourned our relative lack of knowledge of the history of the British Monarchy.  And then there were rows and rows of silver trumpets, gilded maces, and salts!  Er, salt-cellars, I mean.  But they were called salts.  Which is totally not what I want to call them, because "salts" are what I go and shop for on very fancy culinary spice provision websites, but there you go.  Among the royal displays of various dishware and feast settings was my favorite part:  a gigantic punch bowl, practically a birdbath, and solid gold.  The gold was so pure that it looked soft, as though the whole thing were about to melt itself down into a gleaming mess and ooze out underfoot.

Then we slowly paced with a crowd of other tourists through the velvet gloom surrounding the crown jewels.  The gems were astounding; you can't look at a gemstone above a certain size without your brain simply refusing to recognize it as a stone.  Nope.  That's a big piece of colored glass.  No, really, it's a sapphire!  Nah.  Try again tomorrow, maybe I'll believe you then.

We wandered outside, looked at the ravens and the guards, held our umbrellas and squinted up at the rain.  It was pretty cold.



I was apparently on photo-strike for the Tower of London, all the above are Mom's.  We also went into the various buildings and read about the prisoners, and looked at the many wall inscriptions made by those held in those small, damp rooms.  I do wish I had some photos of those now, because it took a couple of days of thought for me to recall that part of the trip.  But then, this travelogue should help with that, too.

More photos, some of them through rainy bus windows!  That was really annoying at the time, but now it looks kind of atmospheric.  Like we were trying for an effect.



Before we exited the bus, we had an opportunity to see something splendid!  It was a Marble Arch!


This Arch is made entirely of Marble!

The bus, not to be outdone by the former day's bus, failed to appear at the time and the place we wanted it to.  And so we waited on a rainy street corner, yet again, for a transit vehicle gone AWOL.  I took this photo:


It looks depressing because it IS depressing.

I wouldn't put it past The Bank Holiday! to have put a crimp in the bus schedules.

A bus eventually showed up, and we hopped on and took some more photos.  I must apologize for the first couple of days of London photos, as they pretty much all fall under the heading of "stuff we enjoyed looking at in London", all in a messy clump.  I assure you, our sight-seeing became far more organized as time passed.  We were still getting used to all of this.



At some point, I'm pretty sure we had lunch.  Then we ditched the stupid buses and took to the Tube again, because we wanted to go to Harrods.  We had been told by a very good source that you simply Do Not Go To London without going to Harrods.  So, we went.  And I must say, it's a truly amazing place, and one real regret that I have now is the fact that I didn't take any photos inside.  We surveyed the housewares, wandered the jewelry stores.  I loved the food court, it was amazing just wandering through and looking at all the stuff... we ended up eating at a tiny Italian place perched on the balcony nearby, where we had a lovely little appetizer, and truly miserable service.

The Egyptian escalator was everything you would expect an Egyptian escalator to be.

On our way out the door -- pressed in by a really dense crowd of people -- Mom realized that she had lost her reading glasses, and we went back inside... and found them broken, if I recall correctly.

Did I mention that Bad Things Kept Happening to Mom?

Later on the way home we stopped at a bakery and bought some tartlets and ate them at the hotel.  They were quite good, and some mollification for the fact that I hadn't gotten anything yummy at the bakery in the food court at Harrods -- it was late in the day when we went (well, like, 4:30pm), so they had all been closing up shop.

The Tube was still a little bit tricky to navigate for closed lines, but we made it, and that was about the last slap-in-the-face-with-a-dead-mackerel we were to receive from... The Bank Holiday!

Praise the Lord for small traveling mercies.



Monday, May 3rd:  Nigh on Cotswold

We woke up in far better fettle than we had on Sunday, our eyes twinkling in anticipation of English breakfast with English tea and American coffee.  But it wasn't just that; on THIS day, we had a Plan!  A Plan that involved other people who actually lived in this wretched country, and thus a Plan that was far less likely to leave us stranded on a raining street corner!  We hoped.

First, let us pause for a moment, so that I can check my camera.


My shirt says "London" on it, and has a picture of tea.

Okay, we're good.

The Plan was to take a train from Paddington to Stroud, where we would meet up with my amazingly awesome friend Joel, and his amazingly awesome wife, Fiona, who I hadn't yet met.  They were actually in the process of backpacking across England.  It was nothing more than sheer luck that we happened to be nearly in the same place at the same time -- no, don't laugh, we actually did have SOME luck here and there on our trip -- and Mom and I had both wanted to see the Cotswolds, so this was our chance.

I had brought my copy of Joel's book, Opium Season, from the U.S. so that he could sign it for me.  Why yes, he is a published author, while I'm at it.  And it's a good book, too.  Unfortunately, I left it in the hotel room and only realized it when we were nearly to the Tube stop, several blocks away.  I promptly freaked out, promised Mom that I could run to the hotel and back in under ten minutes, and proceeded to do so.  My walking shoes were apparently not meant to be running shoes.  But I got back to the Tube stop with my shins fairly intact.

Lovely, wonderful Paddington Station!



And then the train to Stroud.


Look!  Speeding rustic pastoral!


Railroad through Reading


We kept trying to figure out what the golden fields were.

We arrived in Stroud, apparently right on time, and if I'm not mistaken, we were on the same train that Joel and Fi were on, because we all seemed to be tumbling out onto the platform in the same vague crowd of disoriented-looking travelers.  In any case, I spotted Joel very quickly.  He's easy to spot.


He's very, very tall.  And I think he was leaning on me, here.  On purpose.


Stroud!


Fi and Joel and me and Joel and me and Mom and Mom and me and Joel and Fi.
Note:  two of these people look like they actually know what they're doing.  The other two have some really cute raincoats.


From Stroud, under Joel and Fi's guidance, we hopped a bus and debarked at Painswick.  Which was very, very pretty, in a really-pretty kind of way.



Now, at some point here, we stopped for lunch at the pub in the Falcon Inn.  I know this because I looked up Painswick pubs, and the images of the restaurant are unmistakable... what I don't know is why we don't seem to have any photos of it.  In any case, the Falcon Inn was quite an experience.  We decided to eat out on the back patio, at one of the picnic tables, which were handily umbrella'd in case of rain (which there was, as it turned out).  And we sat there, and sat there.  And sat.  And sat.

Joel signed my book for me.

And we didn't really notice that we were sitting for ages and ages and ages because we were all talking up a storm and getting to know each other, but there are only so many minutes you can sit before you finally realize that the waiter has forgotten you.  And then it began to rain, so it seemed the perfect opportunity to go inside and perhaps get somebody's attention, and maybe some food into the bargain.

Brief notes taken about the pub
The fish on Monday was enormous and served to us by a somewhat harried young man by a pub that appeared to be the only spot in town open.  He dropped our tea on the floor.  There was also the most entertaining dog, who whined up a storm as we ate.  Or else wandered around the patio while we waited to eat.  Fish and chips were worth the wait, but I think they may have made Mom sick, or else the tea did; she had a rough time with her stomach later last night and we don't know if it was the unfiltered coffee and toffee tiffin or elsewhich that done it.  Tums to the rescue!  I love Tums.
Yet another episode in the saga of Bad Things Happening to Mom.  (I don't really want to hazard a guess as to why nothing was open, because I'm not going to mention A CERTAIN HOLIDAY again.)

We did get our tea, eventually, and it was lovely -- there was no end of tea.  Why don't I live in England?  The fish and chips were a particular request of mine; I just couldn't say that I'd gone to England and not had any fish and chips.  And boy, did we have some.  That was the most massive plank of fried fish I have ever seen.  Meanwhile, the very large and annoying dog kept wandering the restaurant and whining, loudly and slightly off-pitch.

After that, well, we had to walk the fish off our hips, and enjoy the town.

Little winding cobblestone paths -- I had not yet learned an appropriate loathing for cobblestones -- ivy creeping across the stone walls of buildings, tiny hidden gardens everywhere you look, bordered by weathered bricks and girded in mossy stones.  There's a really delightful tucked-in and hidden-behind-corners feel about the streets and houses of Painswick.  Who wouldn't believe there were gnomes hiding in a place like this?



We met an old man with a far older dog, and walked through a gate and onto a large green.  There was a tea house at the top of the hill, and we headed that way, pretending to be English people who walk for miles every day.  I was deeply struck by the English landscape; even the wild parts looked strangely manicured and well-behaved.  It was very different from the southern U.S., where even cities seem to feel like they've been hacked out of the vigorously tangled snarl of wilderness.  England has been under the green thumbs of cultivators for far longer.  Although I'm sure I would have seen some wild and woolly forest if we had strayed further from the big cities, it was still impressive how neat all of the little meadows and forests looked.



This was Mom's and my first introduction to real "April showers".  Really.  They don't have them in the southern U.S.; for us, it's either dry or a deluge (or a steady pouring all day long).  But this was pretty remarkable:  a sunny sky with these fat little rainclouds skidding across it, pausing to dump a little rain on us, and then going on their way.  Fiona, who is a native, was a savant about those clouds.  She could look at one and not only tell us whether it was going to rain on us, but also when it would start, and how long it would last -- usually no more than 5-10 minutes.

We passed by some gentlemen playing at quoits, I think.  The green led us up a hillside, toward the tea house that Fi and Joel somehow knew about.  We hadn't really been wandering long enough to be hungry, but definitely long enough that tea was a nice break.

Okay, well, maybe I'll just take any excuse to have tea.  What can I say?  Anyway.  This place was not only adorably adorable, but also served all sorts of flavored teas as well as various scones and cakes.  This would be where Mom ordered that toffee tiffin, along with a coffee that was too strong... personally, I have my suspicions about that toffee tiffin.  No respectable dessert would ever call itself a tiffin.

Meanwhile, I was having my very first scone with clotted cream and jam with blackcurrant tea.

Why don't I live in England, again?

Views from the outside of the tea house:



We trekked back through town, and investigated the little church we'd seen on the way in.  This may have been the highlight of the sight-seeing.  Not only was there a mossy little churchyard with amiably decrepit mouldering gravestones, but it was bounded by a garden of painstakingly-tended yew trees, two rows of which had been grown and trained into a walkway tunnel of green.



The yew trees were carefully numbered, all accounted for.


This is Yew #52


It took me a while, but I finally found Yew #1

The interior of the church:



Goodbye, Painswick!



And goodbye to Joel and Fi, because their home that night was a bed and breakfast in the town.  They put us back on a bus to Stroud.



I fell asleep on the train back to Paddington Station, and then we made our uneventful way home.  By then, we had the Tube sorted, as they say.



Tuesday, May 4th

In the night, we had a frost!

YAYYYY.

At any rate, the morning was sunny if a bit, well, by that point we'd given up on anything but cold weather.

A couple of notes from Tuesday
We realized today that Mom's credit card never got flagged for use in Europe, despite her being very careful and calling them a week ahead of time to ensure that it would be flagged as such.  Very upset.  Spent $20 on an overseas call getting that straightened out.

Highly interesting; Mom and I got a chance to see the city alive and moving instead of on holiday.  We also experienced some of rush hour, which was teeming with sober commuters on the Tube.
Bad Things Kept Happening to Mom I'm sure you get the point by now.

Now, before I go any further, let me just say that Oxford Circus is not, in fact, a circus.  And I was disappointed.  But anyway.  It was our last full day in town, so we took the opportunity to visit the Victoria & Albert Museum, which Mom had wanted to see, and which my friend T recommended highly.  As it turned out, the V&A was a treasure trove of a place, and we wished we could have stayed longer.


The faaaabulous Chihuly sculpture in the entryway




Dude, are you aware there's a tiger on you?

Wandering this museum is a little like touring your grandmother's old house.  It's just the most random assortment of things.  I did particularly like the Moroccan window screens.



And then we entered the Cast Courts.  Plaster casts!  Of... everything!  Just sort of jumbled together and tossed into a room.



I'll go ahead and warn you right now, I did stuff like this:



... a lot.  Mainly because I was at a loss to convey the sheer size of most of the things we saw.  But I also realize that looking at photos from these angles can make a sane person dizzy after a while, so, yeah.  My sorries.  But seriously!


The HUGENESS!



I don't know what this thing was:


... but it was AWESOME.



But the first of several museums.  Gird yourself.

More notes
Got a chance to see my friend T, which was wonderful, and had two lunches; one salmon salad with her at a somewhat dodgy Italian place, and one tea and jacket potato (chicken salsa) at a café -- at tea-time (oddly enough).
Yes, we finally finagled our way to meet my friend who hadn't been able to see us on Sunday!  I have to confess, by this point I really felt like I'd thoroughly hijacked my Mom's trip with all of these English friends I somehow collected all over the bloody place.  But as T had to work, we only had her for the space of a lunch, though we had a lovely conversation.  I so ♥ her, and I miss her.

The weather, for a wonder, was decent.

Then, we wandered... and we quickly realized something:  if you want to tour a town, the bus ride is nice and all, but you just can't beat simply wandering around and going, "Oh, look at that neat thing!"  This was a lesson that would serve us well in Paris.  Our loose goal on our walk was to see the Houses of Parliament, because I had yet to catch a photo of them, and -- stunningly enough -- the sun was out.  Thus, we explored some stuff.  Like Parliament!



And Big Ben!



And Westminster Abbey!



And other Londonish things!




It's my Ewin in a box!

We toured the river a bit and got a better look at Cleopatra's Needle, which was kind of necessary, because when you're stuck on a tour bus in the freezing rain and forced to sit on the lower level and peer through smeared glass, you only get to see the base of the monument.




There were these cute painted elephants everywhere, heralds of some kind of art festival.



And then we had the opportunity to walk through a true city phenomenon:  a slice of English garden, sandwiched between the surrounding urbanity and brightening it like a splash of paint.  Welcome to Embankment Gardens.  It was very relaxing, and despite the chill, it was teeming with flowers.  Did we go all the way to London just to bore you with photos of flowers?  I ASSURE YOU, WE MOST CERTAINLY DID.



What now?  Hey, why not Trafalgar Square?  I hear there's like, a National Gallery thing there.



Okay, well, the sun was KIND OF out, I guess.

We had time for a lightning tour of the National Gallery just before closing, and thankfully, I have no photos.  But I'm sure it was lovely.  I think.  And then it was time to wander back to the hotel.

Here was where we ran into the fatal flaw of the "wandering around" style of touristing.

Notes from that evening
After today's adventures, including the V&A, lunch in Oxford Circus, wandering around, going to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, walking along the river until we reached Embankment stop and wandering through Embankment Gardens, which were lovely, heading over to Trafalgar Square and dashing through the National Gallery, then heading for home during rush hour and walking the few blocks back and stopping at a bookshop to get something for my nephew... by the time all of that was complete, Mom and I were literally hobbling back to the hotel.  She's soaking her feet now and I just put mine up for a bit.

Funny thing:  my feet don't look swollen right now.  The reason this is funny is because on day 1 when we first arrived at the hotel, my feet and ankles and face and everything else were so swollen that my toes looked like packed sausages, and it's taken until today for the swelling to gradually reduce.  But a day of pounding them like a hammer and I put them up for five minutes and they're grand.  (Day 2 I had no eyelid crease, my eyes were so swollen... it made putting on eye-makeup a little bit interesting.)

Both decided we are thoroughly sick of the Marble Arch.

What, do you mean THIS Marble Arch?

The H&M store on the corner of Oxford Circus was designed by M.C. Escher.  Just so you know.



And Now, It Is Time for the London Review!

Oh, London.  We loved you.  We were really surprised by how much we loved you, and we want to see you again someday.  Paddington Station, I long for you daily.  *sniffles*

Things learned in London
  • The Italian food is quite good here.
  • Everybody calls the St. Pancras rail station "Saint Pancreas", not just us.
  • London has the most expensive public transport system in the world.
  • Half the people in London do not speak English.
  • English public restrooms are really quite a luxurious experience after years of American ones.  Really -- in a London public lavatory, though you may have to pay to get in (which was interesting), you get a full-length tightly-seamed door on your stall.  All of the bathrooms we went to were nice.  London, I applaud your bathrooms.
  • Most of the barges in the Thames are floating restaurants.
  • The pigeons here appear to be the best-fed in the world, even though the National Gallery prefers that you not feed them.
  • Pedestrians have automatic right of way on certain tiny little roads that cars will creep up behind you and surprise you by being a car in the midst of a heap of walking people.
  • Cars are a bit smaller here.  Roads can be horrifyingly tiny here.  A one-car-width road can be a two-way road.  This is alarming.
  • The birds in Cotswold are amazingly talented singers.  I was stunned by the talents of one bird we saw.
  • There are a lot of clocks here.  It's the city of clocks.
  • Big Ben is the name of the CLOCK.  The tower is called "The Tower".  Because, as the bus tour guide said, "We're rubbish at naming things."
  • It's truly stunning how many historical artifacts have managed to survive so much bloody war in such lovely country.  Quoth Joel, at the Painswick War Memorial, "But look at the bluebells!  How could you fight amongst the bluebells??"


Wednesday, May 5th:  Eurostar and Intro to Paris

We woke up incredibly early (4:30am? 5am?) -- which actually made our jetlag very happy -- to pack up our things and catch a lovely London cab over to the Eurostar, which, according to the cool kids (Rick Steves) is THE way to travel to Paris from London.


The Eurostar station, very early in the morning.

I don't recall much about boarding the train; I know we experienced some difficulty figuring out which was ours, but I don't remember whether that happened on the trip to Paris or from it (or, heck, maybe both ways).  I do recall being really incredibly wrong about choosing a train and a boarding platform at least once, and Mom saving our butts.  Apparently I'm dead reliable on subways, and Mom's the large transport hub expert.  Which makes a lot of sense.  She spends much more time in airports than I do.   And I know that we had deliberately chosen an early train so that we could make the most of our first day in Paris, because we would be losing an hour on the ride over, making our two-hour trip a three-hour trip.  I do recall quite a bit of the train ride itself, though I tried to nap a little while in the English Channel Tunnel -- where, of course, you can't see anything.  It was interesting to get a few blinks of England on the way into it, and then some time later, to see some blinks of France.

The first thing I remember noticing of the (very different-looking) French landscape were the occasional rows of poplars, standing graceful and uniform and neatly in straight lines along various paths and fields.  A little background, here:  almost my first exposure to fine art was an enormous book of French Impressionism, full of colored panels of paintings.  As a result, I could tell a Monet from a Renoir by the age of twelve.  Mom's favorite painter was Monet, and I'm very fond of him, too.  So when I first saw those rows of poplars, almost as hazy and delicate in real life as they had been in Monet's blurred depictions of them, it was actually kind of a shock.  "Wow.  France actually exists!"

And can you believe, I never got a picture of any.  Nary a poplar.

We pulled into Gare du Nord.


You can tell we're in Paris by the posture of the station attendants.

Notes written that evening in Paris
Among the more ironic moments of my life:  laundering my own underwear, socks, and two bras in a sink in Paris' swank Hotel Lutetia, right across from Bon Marché.  Inquired of Mom what the Parisian term for "redneck" might be.  Le cou rouge?

Later:  hung washed nightgown and ratty jeans in the tub from luxurious cedar hangers.  Expect the maid to arrive in the morning and take one look and say, "A-ha, le cous rouges..."

We're tourist riff-raff, it's true, afloat in Rive Gauche.  Paris is a humbling place.

Whereas London was a bustling town where everyone seemed pleased to make things as organized as possible on our behalf, Paris was a little nerve-wracking when we disembarked at Gare du Nord.  My first experience of a panhandler -- they were sprinkled throughout the train station -- was a woman who looked somewhat Afghani (dark skin, strange pale eyes, plain thick scarf covering most of her black hair) who first asked me if I spoke English and then handed me a note in English with her spiel.  I was able to honestly say I had no money, as Mom was at the change counter getting our euros.

A lot of my first impressions of Paris had to do with the overcast sky and the damp, foggy cold that greeted us there.  We waited in a long, freezing line for the cabs, and Paris lurked grimly and stonily around us.  The cab driver didn't know where the hotel was, and once we gave him the address he spent the entirety of the drive answering a series of quick cellphone calls in staccato, highly irritated French.  When we'd hit London, I felt immediately comfortable, but Paris baffles me.  London was harried and colorful and friendly; Paris is big and preoccupied and haughty.  Well, it's Paris.  It deserves to be, I guess.

We shopped around town a bit today, buying some bread and some pastries, a little expensive chocolate, a gift for one of the nephews (an Eiffel tower of chocolate), and a caramel beignet for Mom.  Lunch was rather remarkable; we ended up in the hotel Brasserie and were sat next to a delightful young lady from Toronto.  I was shocked by what a relief it was, after only a couple of hours in the city, to speak English to someone.  Then again, I'm a bit harried by this point.  In London I'd already had my first attack of homesickness at one of the many eateries in the city where the waiters don't speak English (or speak it poorly)... and Mom is suffering from the lack of American coffee (filter coffee or café filtre they call it here) -- the espresso-grade stuff keeps making her sick.
I think at this point I should just make it an acronym:  BTKHM.
But lunch, as I said, was wonderful.  I ordered an appetizer, just an asparagus soup, and Mom got a salad with roast chicken, and there was bread served with the meal, and it was all very expensive of course, but... wow.  That soup was amazing.  It was thick and creamy and rich with butter, and had flaky chunks of fish in it, and Mom's salad was large and dressed with pungent herbs and the cheese was so rich and plentiful that at the end of the meal, I started reaching into her salad and pulling out clots of it to spread on the bread.  Also, the butter is wonderful, here.  When you're in Paris, butter everything:  this was the advice given to us by our lunchtime companion, and she was a wise young lady indeed.
I can say that my first day in Paris was unimpressive.  Mom, on the other hand... well, we'll let her photos speak for themselves:


And Monsieur Chopin doesn't even look happy about being photographed

That's it.  She managed one photo, and said, "I'M GOING HOME!"  (Okay, no, she did not say that, but I could swear she came very close to it.)

The first day in Paris was not very nice to Mom (BTKHM).  We had a difficult time deciphering the map of the angular, slanted streets around our hotel, and the cold - with a nasty wind -- was nearly too much for our little raincoats to take.  For some reason, I had packed slightly warmer clothing than Mom had, so it wasn't as bad for me -- not to mention the fact that I wasn't the one forced to walk around with the running mental soundtrack of "I paid a lot of money to come here, I paid a lot of money to come here, I PAID A LOT OF MONEY TO COME HERE" -- and I felt awful for her.  I think she could have managed if she hadn't spent four days freezing in London, as well.  We had already consigned this vacation to being forever remembered as "Those Ten Awful Days We Spent Shivering In Europe".

Honestly, most of the day is a blur and I'm thankful for that.

We did make it out to Luxembourg Gardens, which was very near the hotel, and wandered until we gave it up and decided to go back and hide in our hotel room.

My photos from our wanderings:



Notes from that evening
Tonight had a bit of a blowup trying to convince Mom to strike Versailles from the week's schedule; as yet she's not enjoyed a single thing that's taken place out-of-doors and I'm starting to go a little crazy.  Then this evening we ordered tea and coffee from room service and she found the coffee undrinkable.  Quel disaster.  We did manage to sit and hammer out a rough schedule for the week...  Hoping tomorrow will be better.

We're planning on doing d'Orsay in the morning.  Museums make us happy; we're definitely museum people, so I'm hoping that fixes us right up for the rest of the week.  We really erred in London not doing a museum right off the bat.
Photos I took around l'Hôtel Lutetia:



Le Bon Marché, just across the common:



Interior of the hotel:



I kept seeing this amusing little guy, dashing toward all the exits:



Our room:


You can tell it's a swanky hotel by the phone in the lavatory nook.


What?

Okay, why did I take a photo of our shower?  Because I was fascinated by the half-glass door.  A swinging door to a shower, okay, fine.  But to only cover up two thirds of the splash radius?  YOU'RE IN PARIS.  DEAL WITH IT.

We quickly realized that the towel warmer had a myriad of uses, among them, warming our blue jeans in the morning, and also drying socks and underwear.  My only complaint was that I thought it would have been better with a "ding" to let you know when your things were adequately warmed.

That night marked the first of many of us turning on the television and being delighted to find a channel that was mostly English news and variety shows.  There was one show that was something like an English version of American Idol, except it was all young girls competing against each other to see who would play Dorothy in a stage version of The Wizard of Oz.  We looked at it sideways for a few minutes, trying to figure it out, and decided it was simply bizarre.  But hey, it had girls with lovely voices singing well-known Broadway tunes.  We followed their progress for the next few nights.



Thursday, May 6th:  Paris Thaws

We woke up in the morning with some trepidation over the Breakfast Situation.

You see, we'd been totally spoiled by the Hilton breakfast in London.  In Paris, apparently breakfast is no big deal; you grab a pastry and a coffee from a street vendor and get a larger meal at lunch.  For yours truly (we, the Delicate Traveling Duo), there were two very large problems with this approach:
  1. Mom couldn't drink the Parisian coffee without getting sick
  2. If I eat nothing but sugar in the morning, I turn into a raving psychotic monster an hour later and then drop into a coma
Furthermore, our hotel room had no drink service, kettle or coffee maker.  Word to the wise:  always bring your electric kettle with you when you go to Paris.  The hotel breakfast was incredibly expensive, and had been expensive to add to the tab of our stay as well, and we were traveling on a budget.  The terrible coffee we'd gotten from room service the prior day had been 9 euro.  And that was the Breakfast Situation.  So that first morning, we went without.

Frankly, we should have stayed at the Paris Hilton.  Why not, everybody else has been there!   HAHAHHAHHAA *cough* sorry.

Despite our rough start, Paris took mercy and decided to smile on us.  We had a few lessons under our belts from London, fortunately:  start your wandering immediately rather than depending upon any tour or plan, figure out the mass transit first thing, and head straight for the museums.  Now, for Paris, we had a Museum Pass, so cost was no bar to us filling our brains with art until it oozed out our ears, if that's what we wanted to do.  And that's... pretty much what we wanted to do.

Notes from that afternoon
Sore and tired, we figured out the Métro (London was excellent training), and made our way to Musée d'Orsay.  It was hard to tough it out to lunchtime, but the Impressionists were quite helpful.  I'm loving Renoir more every year.  He loves blue and lilac.

We saw so much... and finally at 11:30 we ate something at the lovely restaurant on the upper floor.  Lunch was fish and rice (plat du jour), which was delicious but small.  Alas.  Also, they served the bread without butter, and dude, once you've had butter in Paris, the very idea of serving the bread without it is a travesty of epic proportions.
I do not have a single photo from the inside of Musée d'Orsay.  Now, I have a very nice book of professional photos of it, but I left my camera off the entire time we were in there.  And I'm currently wishing that I had taken more photos, because we really, truly, loved the d'Orsay.  It had all of our favorite Impressionists, walls and walls of them, and Rodin statues (he's my favorite), and the building itself was very open and light and interesting.

More Notes
After lunch we arted a bit more, and were scolded by a very indignant lady for sitting cross-legged on the stone benches.  We left the Musée and decided to take a look at the Seine, which was well worth the look.  And poof, there was the Louvre, right across from us.  We decided to cross over, and then scenery hit us like a brick wall.  We started identifying buildings left and right, and then I discovered that the tip of the Eiffel Tower was peeking out at us above one of the rooftops.  THEN I realized I could see the square twin towers of Notre Dame poking up down the river, and well, it was all just very exciting.  Once we were on the other side of the river, we noted that the tremendous Jardin des Tuileries was before us, and we decided to take a look.  I wanted to snatch a peek at the Obelisk of Luxor, and suddenly, we realized we could see the Arc de Triomphe from the Place de la Concorde.  The Arc was one of our go-to stops, and it was simply amazing that we could see it from a mile off like that.  So we decided to take a quick walk down the Champs-Élysées and see the shops.

To make a long story short, we ended up doing several hours at d'Orsay and then walking all the way to the Arc and THEN walking up the steps to the top... and despite the fact that we're both in serious pain right now, it was totally worth it.  My feet are about to fall off.
Now, the best kind of wandering is just like that.  "Ooo, I see a cool thing, let us wander toward it!"  Unfortunately, it's also a good way to walk yourself to death if you're not accustomed to it.

And all of this was done in the afternoon, after the sun had broken through the clouds and made it warm enough that we could actually ditch our jackets.  We ate sandwiches on the Champs-Élysées, very near the McDonald's -- and we couldn't resist ducking inside and getting some fries.  It was a bizarre, subterranean McDonald's with dance-club lighting, and I had trouble ordering the fries... apparently it sounded like I was ordering a drink.  The little sandwich shops were ubiquitous, all with their tiny french roll sandwiches with tomatoes or tuna or roasted peppers, or anything you could think of.

Are you ready for the photos?  You read the above, so you KNOW there are going to be a lot of them.

Photos around the river -- the lovely building with the glass roof is the Grand Palais, and the riverside edifice with the clock is the similarly glass-roofed Musée d'Orsay, and somewhere in here is the Louvre.  This kind of confusion among buildings was pretty common in Paris.  If you've never been there, then know this:  almost all of the buildings were designed by this one guy.  Which is why, in that scene from Inception when she folds Paris in half, the roofs of the buildings match exactly -- you can walk for miles and see the same roofs.  It's elegant, but in some spots, very confusing.



A couple of shots from Luxembourg Gardens, which was much friendlier in the sunshine.  Now, the downed tree here is not a tree; it's a sculpture.




WHAT ON EARTH IS THAT BIG SHINY THING IN THE SKY?

Wandering toward the Obelisk and the fantastic fountain beside it:




I still thought paving stones were charming at this point.




This would be me, trying to be artistic.



Ooo, what's that?  We should walk toward it.




I hate to have to tell you this, London, but THIS is an Arch.



Mooching along the Champs-Élysées, which Mom had to spell for me about seventeen times:



I did a tiny bit of shopping, but I don't think I bought anything.  As we walked, we kept getting nearer and nearer the Arc de Triomphe.  And it kept getting larger, and larger, and larger.


IT'S HEADED STRAIGHT FOR US

And then we were there.



"What do you think, should we go up?  We were going to do the Arc de Triomphe tomorrow."

"Yeah, but seems as long as we're here..."

"Well, I feel fine to go up!"

"So do I!"

And that was how we killed our feet that day.  Still, worth it wouldn't you say?  Photos from inside the Arc:



We took the stairs ALL THE WAY to the top, and then looked out over sunny Paris:



Mom bought a Christmas ornament in the gift shop, and then we descended, just in time to view the Eternal Flame Ceremony:



A couple of notes that evening
Mom is allergic to cocamidopropyl betaine, which is in shampoo and soap, so that keeps causing interesting little mishaps with the complementary toiletries (BTKHM).

I wish to find a fromagerie soon.  SOON.

Today's verdict:  there is too much to do here and not enough feet.


Friday, May 7th:  The Louvre

You should always plan at least one "collapse and take it easy" day on a long trip like this.  By the time we made it to day 7 of touristing, it was starting to feel like a job.  So we deliberately left Friday morning open, planned to do the Louvre in the afternoon, and otherwise, just doof around.  We slept in (sort of), and decided, since it was the whole reason l'Hôtel Lutetia had been built in the first place, why not actually go to the Bon Marché?

Now, the Bon Marché is spread across two buildings; the store proper and, behind that, the Au Bon Marché Épicerie.  In other words, the grocery store.  Now I don't know about you, but I can do with or without a big shopping mall; however, bring me to a big fancy food market, and I go nuts.  And we did!  We admired all of the French food, and Mom got a bottle of wine to bring home to my sister.  We also took the opportunity to buy some pastries, bread and butter and cheese, so that we could actually keep something in the room to eat in the mornings.

We stopped on the way back to the hotel and paid too many euro for a way-too-strong coffee and a cup of tea.  Then we sighed, went back to the hotel, and comforted ourselves with our pastries, which were really excellent.

And then it was time to do:  the Louvre.

The Louvre!  Which was the originator of the entire trip; the predominant item on Mom's bucket list, the crème de la crème of the journey, the pinnacle of our achievement in actually making this trip happen, not only that but furthermore, surviving the trip so far!  The Louvre!  Home of the Mona Lisa!  The finest museum, pretty much anywhere!

And honestly, after we'd seen it?  We decided that we kinda liked Musée d'Orsay better.

Still, it was the freakin' Louvre!  And we took photos.  Note that some of the pictures are slightly blurred or dark; we turned our flashes off inside the museum.


Blah blah, marble arch.



The pyramid:  either a stunning landmark of the Louvre courtyard, or a blight on the face of Paris, depending on who you ask.



Now, we knew that one of the big reasons to go to the Louvre was to appreciate the building as much as the artwork.  I loved the styled ceilings in particular, so prepare yourself for a lot of ceilings.



A lot of things seemed to be under construction.  Half the Arc de Triomphe was being restored when we came, there were parts of the Musée d'Orsay blocked off, and some parts of the Louvre were inaccessible; by this point in the trip, we were just shrugging our shoulders and going, "Enh, it figures."  Of course, if you're a regular museum tourist, you begin to realize that you will never make it through a run of two or more museums in a city without running into construction or renovation.  Apparently museums get broken a lot.



Onward!  More art!  A big part of the reason Mom and I didn't enjoy this museum as much as d'Orsay was the fact that the Louvre focuses on Greco-Roman statuary, the Medieval period and the Renaissance.  In other words, not our favorite periods.  We're both Impressionism aficionados, and I'm a fan of the Realist period as well as the Romantic, so I found a few things to enjoy here, but the Impressionism was all over at d'Orsay.



Glorious rococo ceilings:



The hall of heads, it seems:




What are YOU lookin' at, huh?

More Louvre:




Pardon our progress.



We thought this room was impressive.  That was mostly because we hadn't seen Versailles yet.




OH HAI




She looks disappointed.



Enter the Renaissance... Raphael, Da Vinci.  While we were gazing at the works in this room (with the famous parquet floor), some troglodyte jerk of a tourist nearby was taking flash photos of everything in the room.  An elderly man asked him with great dignity to please stop, "It's bad for the paintings!"  We were shocked in general at how many people were taking flash photos of the unprotected, uncovered paintings; officially the Louvre has banned flash photography, but none of the guards seemed to be enforcing anything.



In fact, the only painting adequately shielded was the lovely lady herself.  I hardly needed to snap her photo, and given the barrier it was difficult to get a focused picture anyway, but I couldn't resist.  Her face changes every time you look at the painting.  Have you ever noticed that?



Whelp, glad that's taken care of, now back to ceilings!



And then some romantics.  Can somebody, ANYBODY explain to me why I have this compulsion to take photos of paintings?  There are better pictures of them available almost EVERYWHERE else.



This guy was tucked into a tiny nook, we'd never have seen him except we were looking for a bathroom:


What a boar.



Although I definitely loved seeing the Steele of Hammurabi in person:



We're getting into more ancient works, now.


SCAREDEST.  CAT.  EVER.

Sumer!  And cuneiform tablets!



We can't go anywhere without hunting down whatever Vermeer they might happen to have:



Alas that he painted so few.  Realists!  Or, uh, more romantics... okay, the delineation gets hazy for me here.



Why, hello there, Rembrandt.




This may be my favorite Rembrandt -- not even joking, and yes, it's his.



We kept going back to the pyramid room, because the Louvre is divided into wings.  You finish with one and then head to the next by way of the central hall.  So here we are going up into the pyramid:


Going up inside the pyramid.

We walked out into a beautiful sunset -- did I mention the weather was nice that day, too?  Because it was.



Goodbye, Louvre!



The upside-down pyramid room, which is not in the Louvre, but the Louvre-adjacent mall.


La Pyramide Inversée

A few snaps as we made our way to the Métro...



Back to the hotel, to snack on cheese and such.  ILL-GOTTEN FRENCH FOODS!  Sheep cheese!  Herbed goat cheese!  Other cheese!  Butter!  Pâté!  There was some bread around there somewhere.  Also note the French coins there -- VERY HANDY, especially considering the various public toilets around, which you had to pay for at a coin-slot turnstile.


Note the advantageous placement of Tums.

Notes taken that evening
Both homesick by now.  Seriously suffering from lack of anything resembling American coffee and British tea.
We were definitely heading for the downhill leg of our journey.  We had just about traveled ourselves out.



Saturday, May 8th:  Versailles

If Friday was to be somewhat restful (and it pretty much was, we only did the one museum), Saturday was to be very full:  It was the day we were going to Versailles!  We were a little tired, a little worn, but hey!  Versailles!  Everybody says to go there.


The train to our doom.

...

We almost didn't make it out of Versailles alive.

I am TELLING you:  THAT PLACE IS OUR OWN PERSONAL VIETNAM.

Notes taken regarding Saturday
Got up early, went back to the Épicerie and bought more stuff for breakfasts etc., went to Versailles.  Verdict:  we couldn't do it.

Way too many days and our feet are giving out.  Total argh.  Accidentally switched my numeric keypad audio guide to Spanish before we actually got to the rooms with the numbered listening sessions.
Versailles was pretty much a nightmare for both of us.  Oh, it was beautiful, certainly, but we had reached that point of sight-seeing -- it always happens on a long sight-seeing trip -- where our admiration tanks were exhausted.  It was "blah blah, beautiful buildings" this, and "ho-hum, magnificent grandeur" that, and Versailles is utterly overwhelming even in comparison to everything else -- despite the fact that several of the rooms were, naturally, under construction.

That bit about getting my audio tour recording switched to Spanish -- I'm not even joking.  I managed to key some code that changed the language, and we were already well into the tour by then.  Mom said that we should go back, but I said, "No.  You listen to the tour, I'm going to take photos."

And I did.  Trudging and exhausted, totally blind to everything around me, Mom shuffling from one audio guidepost to the next like a zombie, me clicking away like an automaton.  I just kept telling myself, "I can look at the pictures later and actually appreciate this place."

So take a frickin' look at my stupid photos of effing Versailles, because they were bought with agony and tears.



Our first look... I'd like to point out that we were walking on cobblestones.  Cobblestones.  I have never in my life felt a surfacing material less amenable to feet.  Why?  WHY DID THEY DO THIS?

First look at the Palace of Versailles, not to mention first look at the crowds that day.  Because it was Saturday.  And the weather was very nice.  Which meant that everybody else had the same idea we did.



For some reason, the outer front gate, despite being nearly identical to the inner front gate, was somewhat tarnished.  The inner front gate, on the other hand, was very shiny:



We made it through the line, and we were in.

So, we like, looked at some stuff.  Apparently some French royal people lived here that one time.  Note that at this point in the day, it wasn't that crowded.



Okay, now, this was maddening.  We kept catching glimpses outside windows of the lovely garden, but couldn't find a way to get out to it!  It became our goal:  we'll keep moving through the palace until we get to the garden.  Little did we know the garden is the last spot on the tour.  You'll keep seeing the garden popping up here and there through the photos.  Taunting us.


Ha ha, you'll never see me!

Oh, look, rooms.



I took this shot just to show the way all the rooms were different colors:



Unfortunately, now we had to walk through all of them.



Blah, blah, beautiful stuff.


HA HA HA I'm so close, and yet NOT!

Blah, blah, statuary.



Blah, blah, rococo flourishes.



All I can remember about this room was that it was pretty awesome, and we weren't allowed to go in:



Good grief.  Not more gorgeous ceilings.  I'm sorry, I just... I can't take it anymore.



Oh, give me a BREAK.



You've GOT to be KIDDING me.



ad;lfksj;lfasjkd;flaksjd;fksj



Can we stop?  Just stop.



... apparently that's a no.

Marie Antoinette, who actually had to live in this hell-hole:



Blah, blah, more fancy stuff (please bear in mind that I ADORE rococo... it takes an awful lot for me to trudge past it like a zombie).



I thought this was kind of fascinating, actually.  Look at the crack in the ceiling they were fixing:



*sigh*  More stuff to look at.



And we hadn't even reached the really impressive part, yet.  The Hall of Mirrors was waiting for us, just ahead.  Waiting.  Like a big, huge, gorgeous, overwhelming monster.


Eat your heart out, Louvre


Look how PREETTTEEE I am!  Baaa ha ha haa.

There were very, very few places to sit.

I thought this was interesting; someone left a handprint on a bench cushion.  I'm not sure how it was done, whatever it was, it was permanently imprinted on the fabric:



Blah, blah, no end of beautiful rooms.  Except, at this point, we really did begin to feel a fear that there would actually be no end to the beautiful rooms.



By this time, it was incredibly crowded, and it was getting very, very hot in there.



Woe.



*deep breath*

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!

One bright moment, for me at least, was this ceiling, which was painted in a trompe l'oeil style.


Every bit of the border is painted, not carven.

But alas, there was more French royalty to get through.  And now they didn't even have interesting hair.



Blah, blah... uh, blah.



And now the Hall of Battles.

Despite the fact that I was completely unconscious by this point, the following are some of my favorite photos of the entire trip.  But I can't recall a second of actually being in this room.  It had to have been me, though, because the photos came off of my camera.



Okay that was great.  Are we THERE yet?



And then...

WE MADE IT.  TO THE GARDEN.



We sat on a bench.

"I'm tired.  You tired?"

"I'm exhausted.  I'm too exhausted to stand.  I might be too exhausted to breathe."

"We should go."

"How do we get out?"

You have to traverse the entire route that you took going in.

Now, to really get the full effect of this, what I ought to do is just post ALL OF THOSE IMAGES in reverse.

Like so:



THAT'S WHAT WE HAD TO DO.

Remaining notes on Versailles
We lasted about three hours and Mom lost her sunglasses; at that point, we gave up and tried to escape, which was nearly impossible.

On our way back through town we found an emergency sandwich and quiche stopping point, and were set back on our feet well enough to make it home.
We actually were laughing (despairingly) at one point that, "Versailles is never going to let us out!"  And the glasses, good grief.  This was a very rough trip on Mom's glasses (BTKHM).

We staggered out into the front courtyard, beaten, bewearied and befuddled.  Versailles, we surrender.  You totally win.  Just let us go back to the hotel.  Bye bye, Versailles!


Bye bye, SUCKAS!  HAHAHHAHAHAHAAAAA!

Versailles has an evil laugh.  A couple of snaps from the train ride back:


I hear bad things about that "puke" gang.



We returned.  We collapsed.  It was most refreshing.

We vowed never to go to Versailles again.  Actually, I don't think we did, but at any rate, I'm never going again.

Notes from the rest of the day
Rested and then went to Bon Marché the Actual This Time, where we oohed and ahhed over the many, many designer items... somewhat like Harrods but a little bit more spaced out.  Wish I'd had my camera to capture the Darth Vader made of legos, but oh well.

Mariage Frères tea shops are everywhere here and I am in love.

Visited the Épicerie again and tasted wine.  It was strong, but good.

Now back; it's 7pm and we're both wasted.
I loved that Épicerie.  Mom bought me a tin of Mariage Frères tea -- French Breakfast flavor.  It's the best unflavored black tea blend I've ever tasted, it remains my favorite to this day, and you can't find it in the U.S.



Sunday, May 9th:  Île de la Cité

On Sunday, at our collective wits' end for something to do about this awful Breakfast Problem, we finally pulled out the big guns.

We knew that there was a Starbucks nearby.  Within a mile.

Notes from that morning
Woke up 8:30am, unable to move.  I wasn't really sore or stiff, my body had just utterly given out.  We moved around at random, Mom tried to get me up, I told her I couldn't move, bit of a standoff, then I realized that she had bathed the night before and could easily get ready and go out without the necessity of showering.  I suggested we go find Starbucks and get coffee and bring it back before I tried to handle a shower, and was able to stagger up and get on some pants and a shirt and pull my hair back.

We went the half mile to Starbucks before realizing it was just off a Métro stop (Montparnasse, a pretty happnin' neighborhood by all appearances), but when we got inside and I ordered my chai latte and Mom got her café Americano, it was all totally worth it.

And by worth it, I mean we each had a new lease on life, Métroing back to our stop and heading back to the room sipping our various types of rocket fuel.  You just don't realize how much you come to depend upon something like that until it's taken away.

Once I had caffeine, some bread and butter and a pastry, I was more than ready to face the day.  I went and took a shower and we were off at around noon.
I absolutely can not overestimate the glorious relief of sitting down and hesitantly tasting our watery, milky, sweetened American-style beverages.  We just sat in Starbucks, tears in our eyes, saying, "Why didn't we do this SOONER?  This could have saved our lives!"

Lesson learned:  when in France, do not hesitate to seek out Starbucks in case of emergency.  They are there for a reason, and that reason is beleaguered, exhausted American tourists.

That, as it turned out, was the beginning of one of our best days of the entire trip.  The plan:  Sainte-Chapelle, Notre Dame, and then, whatever.

Off we went to Île de la Cité, crossing over the Seine to the little island full of big churches.  It was a bit crowded with buildings, which made it oddly easy to get turned around and miss Notre Dame completely.  We kept seeing important-looking edifices peeking out through gaps in other important-looking edifi.



So we found Sainte-Chapelle without quite spotting Notre Dame ("We could see it from our hotel, why the heck can't we find it now?"), and stood in line to go in.  Word to the wise, the long lines for attractions these days are always a result of bag x-ray check and stepping through the metal detector, rather than ticket check which goes much more quickly.  Sainte-Chapelle was utterly worth it, though:  a teeny-tiny two storey building, one lower chapel and one upper, and the upper is so stunning with the windows that you can only stare in awe.  My photos couldn't capture the colors; one of the windows in particular had cobalt-purple glass in it, and the camera made it blue.  It was amazing.

Shots of the lower level:



Then we went upstairs.  A few notes on the upper chapel:  these windows were created during the 13th century, and when you take a look at the colors, that's really amazing.  There isn't a photograph on the internet that does them justice; ALL of them wash the colors out slightly.  Photos of the room make it look spacious and large, but it really wasn't.  It felt relatively small, compared to the other buildings we'd been around and through.  It was very dark and quiet, and the room was furnished with nothing except a row of close-spaced chairs along each wall, so that you could sit and look up at the windows.  That's all there is to do at Sainte-Chapelle, and it's well worth doing.

Shots of the upper level (apologies for the repetition; that was basically me, desperately trying to take a picture that captured the colors even halfway adequately):



From the outside, it's comparatively unremarkable.

Okay, now, where are we again?



Well, wherever we are, it's nice.



We wandered around and found ourselves in a flower market, and tried to combine the admiration of our surroundings with trying to locate Notre Dame, and mostly failed.  In fact, we got so lost that we wandered ourselves right off the island, and had to retrace our steps.

We finally found it, though:


Here I am!

Now, here was a moment I recall with some chagrin:  we wandered around outside of Notre Dame, taking our photos, and then we decided... not to go inside.  There were a million people around, the lines looked long, and neither of us had any feet left.  And so, as a result, we didn't see inside Notre Dame.  And that's something I'd definitely like to do the next time I find myself in Paris.  In the meantime, here, have some photos of the outside!  We had to wrestle with the local panhandlers to take our photos in peace.  Mom actually had a bit of a scuffle with one of them, and I'm glad I was standing fifty feet away at the time and that I didn't see any of it, because if I'd seen someone lashing out at my Mom, I probably would have pounded their ass into a pudding, and then I'd have been put into a French jail to be made a cable tv special of.  And I was starting a new job the following week, so that would really have sucked.

Anyway, what was I saying?  Photos!  Surrounding stuff:




I dunno why I liked this pigeon; it just looked like the world's oldest pigeon and I admired him for surviving.


Lots of peoples that day.

Charlemagne, looking dapper in verdigris:



The Dame her magnificent self (she's a very big girl):



And then you just start taking close-up shots.  Take care not to miss the bored gargoyle:



And after that, just try not to get overwhelmed.




This shiny thing persisted in following us around for like, three days straight.

Notes from Notre Dame
We walked around the side because I'm a total goofball for flying buttresses, took pics at the garden in the back, and then wandered back around and had crepes and -- get this -- diet coke with ice in the glass.  Mom had a caramel banana and crème crepe, I had a nutella and crème crepe, and we sat and stared up at the flying buttresses and Mom read about the gargoyles and we surmised upon the soon-to-be status of our respective blood sugar levels.
I really am goofy for flying buttresses, and not just because it's fun to say.  We went around the side of the church to see if we could get a look at them.


Passed by this nifty statue

Here's the side of the Dame:



BUTTRESSES!  BUTTRESSES GALORE!



AREN'T THEY BEAUTIFUL??  I mean, from an engineering standpoint if nothing else.  For those of you with no appreciation of Gothic architecture:  the flying buttress is a load-bearing strut that is placed outside of the building.  This is done so that the architecture can be Gothy (i.e., so tall and pointy, and with so many windows, that the walls will not support themselves).

Well, I was just delighted with them.  There were also shops along the side of the church, and we had an open afternoon, so we stopped and got souvenirs.  (I got a t-shirt.)  Then we noticed there were crepe stands everywhere.

Now, one of Mom's to-do items was to eat a crepe, so I said, "Let's seize this opportunity!"  And we sat down, and ordered our crepes, and wow.  They were amazing.  But what was much more amazing is that we were sitting and eating crepes twenty feet away from Notre Dame.


We ate crepes RIGHT HERE.

The French really do know the secret of surviving on dairy and pastries; as long as you walk seventeen miles a day, your blood sugar will be just fine, as it turns out.


Some random building nearby.  Wait.  Why is this here?

We wandered around to the flower garden behind the church.  I got some more pictures of flying buttresses!  From the rear, this time!



At some point, a drunk Englishman began to jump around in the fountain and make speeches, but he's not in any of the photos.

We hopped on the Métro and we were still pretty tired.  We thought we might be able to fit in one last stop, though.  Why not hit the Eiffel Tower?  Just to see it.  Just for a second.

Rick Steves says the best stop to get off of to view the Eiffel Tower is Trocadero, so we went to that stop, and went outside into the sunshine.  There's a sort of pavilion, leading down to steps, and then across a park, there it is.



The sun was shining, kids were playing around the fountains, and enterprising but friendly young men from Nigeria were selling second-hand purses on the sidewalk.  How could we not walk down a little further?



We asked a fellow tourist if he would take our photo in front of the tower.  He took this one.  It's our best picture of the whole trip:



The grounds were truly laid out for a perfect presentation of the tower.  It was stunning.



And... of course... it was under some renovation.  C'est la vie.

It was time to Métro on back home.  We stopped through Montparnasse for something to eat, and I got a few city shots.



The old world and the new.

I had to get a shot of this guy before we left the city:


When in a foreign country, this little dude is your Best Friend.

Notes from that evening
Caught the end of the Dorothy show on tv.  Mom v. excited.  Personally, I lost interest after they kicked off the little blonde girl who sang "Send in the Clowns".  Packed up and got ready to wake up at 4am and leave for the train in the morning... now watching Antiques Roadshow.

Tomorrow will be brutal, but really... I doubt it'll be much harder than the first day in London.
And it really wasn't, not at all.



Monday, May 10th - Departure

Notes from that morning
Trip back.  Woke up late; 4:30 instead of 4 because I set my alarm for 5.  Nothing like sheer panic to get you awake in a hurry... I flew to the shower and we were packed and out by 5:15 or so.  Taxi to Gare du Nord; this time our driver was a pleasant fellow who seemed, as the young woman from Toronto said, keen to practice his English.  He was pleasant and chatty and kept his eyes on the road, chatting with us and playing some quiet Mozart on his stereo which was a balm to the ears at 5:30am.

It was a job and a half finding out where the Eurostar was.  We wandered around Gare du Nord, which again was dark and sinister, but this time also bleak and shuttered with morning, all of the information desks closed; filled with baffled travelers.  We filled out our non-EU visitor cards incorrectly and got bitched at by passport check; oh well.  Made it on the train nice and early and ate bread and butter and jam for a bit... snoozed our way over the Channel except for a brief interlude in which someone's alarm clock was going off in their luggage for a good ten minutes until a lady a few seats ahead of us went back to volubly chastise the person in French.

It was a shocking relief to see the signs for eateries in English once the train pulled in to St. Pancras.

Taxi to Heathrow at a bit of a discount because the trip cost 60 pounds but we told the cabbie ahead of time that we only had 50 pounds in cash (which was true, the rest was unchanged euro and USD), and he agreed to take us for that.  Didn't realize Heathrow was quite so far.  Still like the cabbies in London.
We quietly made our way out of Paris, and then out of London.  I didn't take any photos until we got into the plane.


I have no idea what this is, but it looks like a flight hazard.  Or a verdigri'd plane statue.

The flight was delayed, and truth be told, we'd been worried about that even before we left on the trip.  Because, well, in addition to everything else that had happened, there was... if you recall from last year... a volcano in Iceland that was redirecting air traffic all over the North Atlantic.

... named Eyjafjallajökull.  Remember?  I had to look it up.  Funny, I should have paid more attention to the news last year, I could have gotten some major laughs watching news anchors trying to pronounce that name.

Our flight was delayed by a couple of hours, but we did get to take off, so that was good.  However, the floating ash did re-route us, so that we ended up flying over Greenland.  I took advantage of the situation to get some photos of some amazing terrain.



When we arrived back in the states, weary and haggard, there was a rush of gates and luggage and Customs -- Customs, which seemed a slightly bigger deal than it had been in Europe, but really, no, still not a big deal -- because the folks at the Philly Airport were actually really kicking it to get us sorted out and sent on to our connecting flights before our planes took off.  I have never been hustled through an airport that fast in my life, and as a result, Mom and I gave each other a rather harried goodbye and then ran down the hallways to get to our separate cities.

What then?

Well.  We went home.  And I started a new job the next week.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, we both collapsed for a few days, had miles of stories to tell our friends, and were thereafter and forever dissatisfied with American butter.

And someday, we're going to Scotland.



THE VERY END
My my, you're a VERY persistent reader, aren't you?  Well done!