Paris and the Loire Valley

On Wednesday the 26^th Cynthia and I were dropped off by Kelly at the Denver airport, bright and early, for an 8:30 AM flight to North Carolina. We had lunch in Charlotte, and then caught the flight to France. As usual, we slept little, but after an uneventful flight, arrived in Paris at 7 AM. We caught the Rossibus into town, and then had to wait a while to find a cab to our hotel.

Our hotel was La Manufacture, named after the drapery and tapestry company that previously had been in this area. The lady at the front desk was very friendly and helpful. Our room was fine, although small.

We had resolved to stay up as long as we reasonably could, so we headed off for the Chapel Saint Chapelle, famous for 13^th century stained glass, telling the entire bible story. This chapel was built by King Louis IX, later Saint Louis. The stained glass is currently being restored, but most of it was visible. Impressive, especially given the area of stained glass. It would have been nice to have binoculars to look at the upper stained glass, which was hard to see. There was also impressive stone carvings.  The chapel is part of a government building complex, so we had to go through security.

Bridge over the River Seine

We were getting tired, so we stopped for lunch. After lunch, we decided to go to the Middle Ages Museum, sometimes called the Cluny Museum, where we saw more stained glass, but smaller panels close up. There were also many statues, tapestries, and other objects from the Middle Ages. However, Cynthia was starting to fade, so we left without seeing the entire museum, and and took the bus back to our hotel.

We went to bed around 7 PM.  We had been up for 30 hours.  Richard woke up and saw 9:30 on his watch.  He saw light outside, not realizing that the sun sets very late this far north, and figured that it was 9:30 AM the next day, so we took showers and started to pack.   Cynthia was complaining about her bloodshot eyes.  It turned out that it was really 9:30 PM, so we went back to bed. He learned that the time on his iPhone does not say AM or PM, assuming that one must know which is which.  But this is not a good assumption for a jet lagged tourist. His watch does say AM or PM, but in tiny letters.

Friday morning we woke up at 9 AM, and went out for a substantial breakfast. Then we went to a supermarket to get some food to eat lunch on the train, but that meant that we left the hotel later than we intended. We took a taxi to the Gare Montparnasse, where we rushed around and had to ask for directions to find our train.  We boarded the train with 15 minutes to spare. The TGV is the Tren de Grand Vitesse, the high speed train. At some points we could see that the train was going much faster than cars on the nearby highway.

We were picked up in Angers by our French neighbor, Jean-Marie, and taken to our delightful house in the small town of Brissac-Quince.  This is the house that Richard exchanged for his house in Boulder.  We will be here about three weeks.