2015 Gay Paris!

We're visiting France this year!

Notre Dame cathedral interior nave

Carnavalet garden

It's May, 2015 and we have just arrived in Paris!  We've planned our trip as an eleven week tour of France - focusing on Paris and the southern and western French countryside. Why did we decide to stay in France?  Because close friends and family absolutely love this country and recommended it highly because of its culture and history.

We're not camping on this vacation; instead we're touring first class (for us) and are renting apartments and cottages for one or more week stays while we will be visiting Paris, and the French countryside including Burgundy, Provence, Dordogne, Loire, and the Languedoc areas. Our intent is to tour where we want, maintain the independence that apartments provide, yet have a home base in each locale.  We will be leasing a car once we leave Paris so that we can be spontaneous in our choices, can visit the less touristy local sites and can drive the back roads to view the countryside.

We've planned our trip itinerary based on the many recommendations from our family travel experts (Al, Doug and Mary Jane) and good friends (Chloe, Heidi, Susan, Donna and Adele), we have all the backup information provided by the Rick Steves and Eyewitness books, plus we referenced the Secret and Most Beautiful Villages and the Ina Carrow books for their recommendations as well.

We've arrived!

We arrived in Paris on a rainy Saturday afternoon, May 2nd - jet lagged and exhausted, but the flight over (via Delta airlines) was perfect with impeccable service and connections, and our ride into town (via the Inter-Service Prestige bus service) was comfortable and easy.

Our Marais retreat

Our room with a view

Our Parisian apartment is located in the Marais district on Rue de Rivoli close to the St. Paul cathedral.  It's quaint with aged charm (complete with creaky uneven herringbone floors, our own tiny WC, a frighteningly narrow/steep four-floor wooden spiral staircase, but we have views of the sky and the busy Rue de Rivoli below, so we can quickly check out the weather and how warmly people are dressed).  Yes, we can hear the motor bikes, the energetic garbage truck pickup in the morning and we have our own personal homeless gentleman on the doorstep right outside our door, but this location is perfect for us.  It's central to great historic sites, museums, Notre Dame, the Marais and a variety of shops and cafes are right around the corner.  What more can you want?

There is so much to see in Paris; we're working our way gradually around the city to enjoy and explore as much as we can.  Here is a sampling of some of the sites so far:

Directly in front of Notre Dame, this marks the center of Paris from which all destinations are measured

One of many Notre Dame stained glass windows

Place Dauphine - small quiet retreat on Ille de Cite - we enjoyed our lunch here on Monday

Model of the Notre Dame cathedral and its flying buttresses

17 Century business advertisements - Carnavalet museum

Hotel Sully garden

Locks of love - Seine

Whipped cream, meringue and chocolate melt-in-your-mouth decadence

Each day we encounter little challenges, like learning basic phrases and words in French and continually trying to be very polite and formal, which is the expected behavior here. And we're adapting...We're discovering that eating a nice lunch out at a cafe or restaurant is wonderful; then we can enjoy a light dinner in our apartment and can go to bed reasonably early.

Tonight's project was to figure out (by reading the Swedish manual) how to operate our induction cook top - task accomplished with trial and error.  Our next task - to work the microwave/oven - but that's for tomorrow...along with resisting those yummy desserts.

More church decals

Pompidou center chaos

Pablo Picasso - cat with tweety

Picasso museum - artwork lovingly displayed

Old world charm; new world fixtures