Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

All in all, it was a super successful trip, honestly I can't really saw how it could have been better. A big thanks again to Jennifer for all the planning work (based on Rick Steve's books).

While this trip never was about visiting Paris, since we get to see it a little bit every year when we go to France for Xmas, we had an extra day in Paris so that I could see my family before flying home, and we had almost a full day to visit Paris during the summer (Jennifer always saw it during winters, some pretty cold).
We started with tour Montparnasse, then went to l'ile de la cité and l'ile St Louis before heading towards City Hall, and Les Halles which was being totally rebuilt. Next we went to the Louvre and caught an impromptu rehearsal for the Bastille Day Paris Overflights, and walked through the Jardins du Louvre towards place the l'Obélisque where we caught a bike transport towards the Free/Proxad offices where I spent a bit of time to fix/upgrade my server in Paris.

les invalides

pont alexandre III

jardins des tuileries

place de l'obélisque

jardins du luxembourg

notre dame

sacré coeur

l'arc de triomphe

école nationale supérieur des beaux-arts

this lock fad is really getting out of hand

préfecture de police

notre dame again

l'église de St Gervais

jardin in front de l'hotel de ville

les halles, being rebuilt

conciergerie

Then, we happened to catch a rehearsal of the bastille day airshow:

And we went through the Louvre towards l'obélisque:

it was a clear day, you could see the obelisque and arc the triomphe through the first arch that day

I used to play with those boats when I was a kid

we went up to get a view better views

centre george pompidou

We then went back to my dad's place to meet some of my family for a dinner which turned out to be in my honor as an early BD party, putting an end to our crazy tour de France (which we incidentally ended just 2 days before the biking tour the France started).

This was out last day visiting France before returning our rental car and taking a train to Paris.

We started with the Bayeux Tapestry which is indeed an impressive work of art, it took 35mn to look at it super quickly because of a fast audioguide that is meant to keep you moving and get you out to make room for others. While my limited knowledge of history easily beat poor Jennifer's who had to content with the abysmal amount of history that is taught in the US, I'll admit that I couldn't make myself be interested with the 1500+ years of history I had to learn as a kid, especially 1000 years+ of kings, wars between them, and between France and England. Turns out that the tapestry actually talks about a French duke from Normandy going to take over the throne of England which for complicated reasons was actually his.
Anyway, this filled a few holes of stuff I never really paid attention to, in school.

After that, Caen memorial was indeed yet another museum on WWII, although it ranged from end of WWI to the cold war. It had plenty of worthwhile displays that easily took 4H (or more if we had extra time).

Eh, I used to do just this in French School :)

We the had just enough time to bring our rental car to the train station, return it and take a train to Paris to meet my dad for dinner:

We headed back to the American Cemetary which had worthwhile displays on the débarquement, as well as a 1h-ish guided tour of the cemetery that was worth the time.

From there, we went to the smaller but still good Omaha beach museum (Omaha didn't work out nearly as well as Utah beach, the losses were much higher due to weather related mishaps).

really?

By then you'd think we had learned enough about D day, but our next destination was Bayeux where we also started with a D Day museum :) From there, we went to town center to see the impressive cathedral, and enjoy the medieval festival that happened to be going on that weekend.

it's quite big

nice collage made by my friend Johannes

Due to the strike at Mt Saint Michel due to the Veolia fuckers, we were not able to see the Abbey the previous night, so we did first thing the next morning. It was reasonably nice to see with few crowds, although we were not able to get an audioguide due to the strike too. On the plus side, it was free, and they forgot to close/man a door that let us access some very small stairs we were able to take to the top of the Abbey, somewhere visitors are definitely not allowed usually, so it wasn't all bad.

Then, we had a pretty painful trek back to our car carrying luggage back down from our room to the buses that are way too far from the city entrance (fuck you very much Veolia again), and very late in the morning we got on the road for Normandie to see D Day beaches and museums.

We went directly to the Utah Beach Landing Museum which was quite good, and had a quick look at the beach. It was good enough to be worth several hours, included a 1H guided tour which explained the basics of how the débarquement worked out to us. It was quite interesting.

From there, the day had gotten late a bit already, so we had run out of time for the American cemetery. As a result, we went to pointe du hoc, which doesn't close. It was a location where Germans had long range guns, and it got bombed to hell, so it looks like swiss cheese, and you can still see the bunkers that didn't get damaged much at all despite the bombings.

From there, we went directly to Longues-sur-Mer to see its Gun Battery that's pretty intact and headed to Arromanches for dinner, walk by the beach, sunset, and sleep. Oh yeah, it does have remnants of port winston (artificial floating harbour from WWII), but honestly, there isn't much left to see.

remnants of port winston, the floating harbour

After Chinon, we started driving north towards Normandy. Thanks to Michel, we stopped at Dinan on our drive. It's a pretty little town with medieval walls and a worthwhile town center, churches, and clock tower to visit. Also had a nice crepe there :)

we walked some of the city walls

very nice

Next was St Malo. It also had a great downtown to visit and great views from its historic walls of the harbor and the ocean. That was well worth the 90mn stop. Quite frankly, it was worth more, but that's what we had.

the crab were so greedy, you put food on a string, and they wouldn't let it go

that kept Jennifer amused and busy for a while :)

From there we took a scenic route along the coast to Mont Saint Michel, with nice coastal views.

Finally we arrived at Mt Saint Michel, and some fucking company (Veolia) managed to get the rights to rebuilding the bridge that is going there. In the meantime, they are now forcing everyone to park far away from the entrance and take a shuttle bus that still stops you a fair distance from the entrance. I wouldn't mind a bit of walking, but when you are carrying all your heavy luggage across a long distance because they are preventing you from driving there, I get pissed off. Did I mention it was one mile of walking with heavy luggage? Fuck you Veolia!
Long story short, getting to our (expensive) room in Mt Saint Michel was quite a pain. Incidently the people doing tours in the national monument, the monastery were also on strike for complicated reasons due to the same company's wrong doings having increased their commute time to work from 20mn to 1h each way.
As a result of the strike, we didn't get to visit the Abey at night with illuminations like we were supposed to, so we just went around the island, walked on the city walls for some views, and went outside to catch sunset and lights as seen from outside (it was late due to the long sun days).

that's how far they dropped us off

Since we figured out that we didn't need to see Amboise further, we were just a bit ahead of schedule, so after a bit of extra sleep, we elected to go to Loches, a nearby city with its own medieval town.

We then went to an underground quarry display showing how things used to be back in the day for people working there (not super great, but they had wild fraises des bois in their yard, so that made up for it for Jennifer :) ).

Azay Le Rideau had another castle that was decent, although a bit pale compared to some of the ones we had seen earlier, however a lot of local castle have their own history, so that's interesting if you care about 500 years+ of which king attacked who, and why, and the 100+ year war between the British and the French:

We then headed to Chinon to see its Castle and history, and visit the old town before heading to our hotel. Chinon had dragons on display to amuse the kids. They looked nice, but a bit out of place :)

We had a bit of time in downtown Chinon, including a nice wine cellar:

After starting with Chenonceaux the previous day, we went to see more castles this day after a nice French breakfast at our chateau hotel :)

Chateau de Chambord is just huge and magnificent. Freaking big is about the right word, and it's arguably the second best Castle in France after Versailles. It was built and grown over a few centuries and was where the French Kings went on vacation, although they never stayed too long because Paris was more convenient for them. The gardens were nice, despite the light rain.

double helix stairs in the middle, just like DNA

We stopped at a chocolate store that happened to be on the way with samples to try :)

Cheverny was smaller, but very nice inside too. The part I didn't know was that the chateau and nearby city were used as the background for Tintin, a great comic I read as a kid. They had an expo on that which was fun to visit while Jennifer was sampling local wine as she does best :)

The tintin expo was definitely worth the visit:

even the characters were based on real people

While I was looking at tintin, Jennifer found a new wine tasting place iwth a high tech delivery system :)

We then drove by Chaumont sur Loire, but didn't enter it after some reviews I read saying that the inside didn't look good, but I took a few pictures from outside:

We used the time to go to Clos Lucé instead, the not so great small castle where the king François 1er hosted Leonardo the Vinci for the last 3 years of his life and just paid him to do whatever he felt like. In other words, the king recognized Leonardo as a genius and gave him free reign to invent and study whatever he felt like. They have cool demos of some of Leonardo's revolutionary inventions.

he invented the first tank

he also figured out the first parachute

his idea of a helicopter, only missing an appropriate powerplant and counter rotating rear prop

water pump without vaccuum or motors

the bearing

secret underground passage to the chateau d'amboise

This gave us enough time to walk back to downtown Amboise, walk by its chateau that did not have the time to visit but wasn't that great from what we heard anyway, and got a few pictures outside around sunset before heading back to our Chateau hotel for the night.

On our way out of Dordogne region, before going to see Lascaux, we did a very quick stop at Sarlat we had flown over the previous day, for a super rushed visit (like only 20mn, which quite obiously not enough, but we had to get to Lascaux by 9 to get tickets for that morning, so we only had time for a few minutes in Sarlat. It was still better to see it very quickly than not at all: cool medieval town with city walls too.

we went to see Lascaux II, a replica of arguably the best cave with prehistoric paintings ever found. Ok, it's a copy of the original cave that is too small and couldn't cope with the extra CO2 brought by the visitors, but it's a really good copy and it looks incredible. Worth the visit, even after everything we had seen. Still no pictures allowed inside, despite the fact that it was a replica, so I'm attaching some pictures I found on the net:

looking around while waiting for the ticket counter to open. I think they love duck there ;)

From there, we started a long drive north, and stopped at Oradour sur Glane where the German SS massacred an entire french village (around 600 people), apparently "just because" and as a show of force with the resistance (which didn't live there). The burnt village was left as is as a monument (minus the bodies of course) and is worth seeing, although the museum that's supposed to explain what happens, and why, and whether the culprits were found later, does a very poor job of addressing those points. Quite a shame, really. Since the museum was so bad at explaining the relevant points, I went to the wikipedia article which explains better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oradour-sur-Glane

women and children were gathered in the church and burnt there

After Oradour sur Glane, where we kind of wasted time at the subpar museum, we got back in the car to finish the drive towards the Loire region. We had just enough time left in the day (lots of driving) to go to Chateau de Chenonceau, a beautiful castle with great grounds and pretty gardens. They also had an impressive collection of 100 hunting dogs.

cellars for Jennifer :)

That visit and the long stretches of driving got us a bit late, so we didn't have time for much of a dinner, and just got a very quick bite to eat before going to our chateau hotel where we got a huge room and chateau life for 2 nights.

For another full day, we stayed around our hotel on the Dordogne River. We didn't have it on our list, just because our days had been so long already, but Jennifer had heard that kayaking down the Dordogne was great and scenic, so I looked into how we could do this the previous night. The next morning, we drove to a rental place that bussed us up the river, and let us go down in a canoe at whatever pace we felt like. It was a nice ride down with castles and bridges.

We stopped across from Chateau de Beynac to have a nice picnic across the river with view on the castle, and opened a fresh container of foie gras to enjoy there.

We then went to visit Chateau de Beynac and Chateau de Castelnaud (thank you again google maps for sending me up an impassage road to the castle), both castles had interesting history before, during, and after the 100 year war between France and England.

After having finished both, we went back to Domme for a flight over the area with a local pilot in a C172 with diesel conversion.

Sarla-la-Canéda

We didn't have enough time or energy left to go to Sarlat that evening, so we went back to our hotel and had super yummy dishes with Foie Gras made by the bistro next door and that I was able to bring back to our room and eat on the terrace. Can't beat that :)
(yes, the foie gras ducks didn't fare too well during our trip in Dordogne :)

nice nose on that hot air baloon