Tuesday, July 7

Today was a test of our tolerance for crowds.

Our reservations were for 10:30, and we expected it to take about an hour to get there, so we left at about 9:00. The Metro was packed with morning rush-hour traffic. Our route had us change from the Metro to the RER at Invalides station. At that station, there are gates on the platform such that both the train’s doors and the platform gates have to open. Unfortunately, the platform gates at our door were out of order, so we couldn’t debark, and the train wasn’t stopped long enough for us to push our way to a different door. So we had to go one stop further, then backtrack.

Our next task was to find our way to the RER train. We must have looked confused, as very quickly a young Parisienne asked if we needed help. More support for my belief that the French get a bad rap in the rudeness department.

Naturally, the RER train (a double-decker much like one I rode in Chicago) was packed, with almost all passengers staying on until the end of the line at Versailles. From the train to the palace, navigation was trivial – just follow the crowd.

Even being half an hour early, the line for 10:30 entry was quite long. We have to wait on a cobblestone plaza with no shade. We were still a few hours before the hottest time of day, but it was already getting uncomfortable. There are three lines here: one for the 10:00, our 10:30 line, and one for 11:00. You really must want to be at the head of the line if you’re willing to stand in the sun for an hour.

Once we were let inside, it was simply a matter of following the tide of the sea of humanity. But that’s the wrong metaphor. It’s more a river than a sea. We are swept along from room to room, covering more than half a mile, by my guess. After touring only a small part of the interior of the Palace, we went out into the gardens. The scale of the place is difficult to grasp.

I was somewhat prepared for what I saw. When I was in high school, I went on a trip to the Soviet Union with my Russian language teacher. There, we visited the Hermitage Museum, which is the second-largest art museum behind the Louvre. The Hermitage used to be the Tsar’s Winter Palace and was patterned after Versailles. We were told that if we looked at a work of art for 30 seconds, it would take 117 years to make it through. It may not have been 30 seconds or 117 years, but those numbers are close enough to give the scale.

One of the first rooms we visited was the Chapel. The King worshipped there every day he was in residence. The organ is still used today for special events and masses. I didn’t know until we left that there’s also a church on the site. It’s not as big as Notre Dame or the other medieval churches I’ve visited, but I guess when you’re King, having both a chapel and a church at your house is de rigueur.

The most famous room in the palace is the Gallery of Mirrors. It may be the most famous room in any palace. It’s not quite the length of a football field, but it’s narrower. The ceiling is decorated with thirty large panels depicting the important events in the Sun King’s reign. It is perhaps also best known for a few important political events. The Armistice of Versailles was signed here, ending the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. This document should not be confused with the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I. That wasn’t signed in the Gallery of Mirrors, but in a rail car, the Compiègne Wagon. What might Hitler have done to the Gallery of Mirrors had the treaty been signed there?

I can’t say if the Palace of Versailles has as much art in it as the Hermitage, but from what I can tell, the Hermitage is slightly larger. So, if you could access the entire palace and view each piece of art for a few seconds, you’d be done sometime around the start of the next century.

The best word I can think of to describe the place is “obscene”. This place, the building and the grounds, are built on the slavery of an entire nation. Each room is a work of art, filled with dozens of works of art. The ceilings are murals, the walls covered with paintings, the spaces filled with statues and ornate furnishings. Each object of art is the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of effort. It is mind-boggling. What sort of ego would one have to have to employ an entire nation to build, furnish, and maintain his house? Keep in mind, this wasn’t his only palace. The Louvre was one of his homes – it’s bigger than the Winter Palace, bigger than Versailles – and he had at least half a dozen others. Clearly, it’s good to be King.

The gardens are quite lovely, but we didn’t get to see them at their best. I don’t know if it has to do with the heat or if there are water conservation measures in effect, but none of the fountains were operating, and there weren’t many flowers in bloom. There was an abundance of gardeners at work, and the Chestnut Grove is undergoing restoration.

We ate lunch at one of the restaurants in the garden. We were a captive audience and paid prices worthy of an F1 race or an NFL game.

We left the grounds a bit before 2:00 and were back on the crowded RER train, followed by the crowded Metro. When I say “crowded”, I find it hard to avoid the cliché of “packed in like sardines”. It was bad enough that Genae said, “Never again!” and so we’ll be taking a taxi to the airport tomorrow rather than taking another ride on the RER, dragging our luggage.

Back at the hotel, I took a nap before we ventured out for dinner. At the restaurant we chose, our waiter had only a few words of English, but he was friendly and cheerful, and we had little difficulty communicating. Is this an advantage or disadvantage to picking a hotel that’s not in tourist central?

As I was writing my notes of the day, it was 10:00 pm and not yet sunset. We still haven’t gotten accustomed to climbing into bed before dark. We’re both ready to go home. It’s been a long trip, with most of our days packed with activities. I’d say we’re looking forward to some well-deserved relaxation, but Genae is already anticipating several loads of laundry and some grocery shopping because we have no produce in the house.

In any event, we’re off to the airport in the morning for a long airplane ride home.

Wednesday, July 8

Everything on the return trip went according to plan. The taxi, although much more expensive than mass transit, was quick and comfortable. We bought some sandwiches and snacks for the flight, anticipating we’d have service much like our flight over. They darken the cabin, even though it’s a daylight flight the entire way, and I don’t want to be “that guy” who has his reading light on, disturbing the other passengers, so I watched three movies (one good one, one bad one that was funny, and one that was just bad).

I wasn’t sure whether I’d like the guided tour of Normandy. If we hadn’t used our “free day” to go back to the invasion beaches, I would have been disappointed. But I enjoyed the places we visited that I’d never have come up with. We both enjoyed it enough that we’re considering going on another one in a year or two. Perhaps one that is more focused on scenic beauty than on churches and museums.

As to our self-guided visit to Paris, I enjoyed it, too. Having no (or few) specific plans and making it up as you go may not be the best way to see the world, but it works for me. There’s no direct correlation between this and hiking off trail, but I think both stimulate the same part of my brain. I seem to enjoy answering the questions “Where do I want to go next?” and “How do I get there?”

So, how thorough a job of seeing France did we do? Of the 20 most visited attractions (according to tripsavvy.com) in France, we managed to hit 5 of them:

• 3 – Eiffel Tower
• 4 – Château de Versailles
• 8 – National Museum of Natural History
• 11 – Omaha Beach American Cemetery
• 17 – Mont St-Michel

Not bad for a 10-day trip, I think.

Monday, July 6

Anyone who has made it this far into our trip to France may be able to guess what is on today’s agenda. If you’re tempted to skip to the next entry – wait. I’m going to bore you with so much more than just another church and another museum. Lots of photos this time.

Our day wasn’t planned, other than wanting to visit Notre Dame. Otherwise, we made it up as we went.

Although planned, our visit to Notre Dame wasn’t well planned. You can go online and make reservations to visit Notre Dame, so that’s what we did. However, they were all sold out. They allow as many as 15,000 reservations a day, yet between 30 and 35,000 people pass through the doors every day. Since less than half the visitors have reservations, we figured we’d get in, but expected we might have to wait in a long queue.

Every large city these days has a homeless population. Small towns and villages may also have unhoused people, but I haven’t noticed any in any of the places we visited in Normandy. No doubt, residents of Denver know where the homeless tend to congregate, and if tourists don’t travel through those areas, they’d be invisible. The same, I’m sure, is true of all other cities. On our walk from the Metro station to Notre Dame, we walked through one of those areas. It struck me as a bit incongruous to find what looked like semi-permanent accommodations for the unhoused just a block away from Notre Dame in one direction and a few blocks from the Louvre in another. I didn’t expect it.

Anyway, we walked up to Notre Dame at 8:15 to find no line at all.

We could only wander through a small part of the church. We’re not sure if that was because that’s as much as can be visited now, or if it was because we got there during a service. If this had been my first visit to a Gothic cathedral, I’d probably have been disappointed. Having been inside a few now, perhaps I’m getting jaded. It’s a beautiful building and an impressive feat of engineering for its time. But is its fame due to it being above the rest, or is it just because it’s famous? I wonder if I was more impressed with the St Michael & St Gudula Cathedral in Brussels because it’s more impressive, or because I saw it first.

Even though Notre Dame is open, it is still being renovated after the fire. There is still quite a bit of scaffolding on its south side, a crane hovers over it, and there are shipping containers stacked up next to it. When we first walked in, I thought I caught a strong, momentary whiff of smoke, but that may be my imagination.

Fifteen minutes after walking in, we walked out.

We hadn’t eaten breakfast yet, so finding a boulangerie was next. This is not a difficult task. What’s difficult is choosing exactly how to bust the diet. I picked a deadly-looking pastry covered with raspberries. I had these in Brussels last year, but today’s had more raspberries. If it’s covered in raspberries, it’s gotta be healthy, right? Right?

Now we had to settle on our next tourist destination. Genae was in France for a few weeks in high school and had already been to the Eiffel Tower. Initially, she wasn’t too keen on going again, but it didn’t take much effort on my part to get her to go, so we hopped back on the Metro.

We were thinking that, because we hadn’t planned and thus hadn’t bought tickets, we wouldn’t be able to ride the elevator up. Genae certainly wasn’t going to take the stairs. Again, we were pleasantly surprised that planning wasn’t required. We took the elevator up, wandered around a bit, took in the views, and wondered repeatedly, “What building is that?” before taking the stairs down to the next level. It’s theoretically possible to climb to the summit, but it’s closed. I don’t know if that’s temporary or not. The lower level is full of trinket shops and restaurants.

On our trip down the stairs, we spotted a group of engineers with hard hats and binoculars inspecting the structure. I also noticed that the stairs going up are more worn than the stairs going down (walking on the right side, that is). I’d have guessed it would be the other way around. Don’t more visitors walk down than up?

Back on terra firma at 11:15, it was again time to figure out our next stop. While up in the tower, we saw the cruise boats on the Seine. Why don’t we take a cruise? Google Maps has some unexpected behavior. When we asked it to direct us to a cruise company, it said we could go 4.2 miles to find one. When I searched “night cruise”, it said one was a bit over a mile away. Instead, we crossed the street west of the tower and bought tickets for the boats right at the foot of the tower. With departures every thirty minutes, and, again, with no pre-purchased reservations, we walked up, bought tickets, and after a five-minute wait, boarded a boat.

The boat goes up the river, turns around above the Île de la Cité, then turns around to go back down the river on the other side of the two islands. The kids’ thing with moving the hands up and down, palms up, and saying “six seven” is still big here, it seems, as somebody did it on every bridge we sailed under. I still don’t get it.

There are 37 bridges over the Seine in Paris. All have names that are somewhat more poetic or informative than, say, “23rd Street Bridge”. I snapped pics of all that we sailed beneath, but two in particular caught my attention. The first was Pont Alexandre III, completed in 1900. It is named after the Russian tsar, and his son, Nicholas II, laid the foundation stone. The bridge is widely regarded as the most ornate, extravagant bridge in the city and has been classified as a French monument historique since 1975.

The other one that caught my eye was the Pont Neuf. That means “new bridge”. It’s an ironic name, though, as it’s the oldest standing bridge in the city. Construction was completed in 1607. When we passed under it, I wasn’t sure which bridge it is. It’s currently wrapped with part of a large art installation. The temporary inflatable piece, known as La Caverne du Pont Neuf, was initially due to open in June, but the vast trompe l’oeil canvas was torn during a recent storm.

As I have lived most of my life in Colorado, where we have no navigable waterways, I was a bit surprised to see cargo barges on the Seine. When I think of river cargo, I think of the Mississippi, or Missouri, or Ohio Rivers and the giant barges. The Seine isn’t very big compared to those rivers, and it has all these old, ornate, low bridges. Nonetheless, there’s a fair amount of barge traffic on the Seine, including container ships and bulk cargo. Cities were built on rivers because of transportation. Why shouldn’t that still be true, Dave?

I had a short conversation with the guy seated next to me. He’s visiting from Melbourne. More precisely, he’s visiting London. He and his family were here in Paris for the day – they woke up in London and will go back to sleep in London. That makes for a short visit to Paris. Talk about a whirlwind tour.

Now that it’s one o’clock, it’s time for lunch. We decided to grab some ham and cheese baguettes and eat in the park at the foot of the tower.

While noshing on our tasty sandwiches, we asked ourselves two questions. First, facetiously, could we see all the sights in Paris in one day, and, second, seriously, what’s next on the hit parade?

How did tourists do the tourist thing before the internet? Okay, sure, they planned ahead, unlike me. A few minutes of searching resulted in some interesting possibilities. Unfortunately, the first two that we selected, the Catacombs and the Musée d’Orsay, were no-goes as it’s Monday and they’re closed. I couldn’t ver well subject Genae to another military museum, so I let her decide. The heat of the day had set in (Paris is undergoing another heat wave), so someplace air-conditioned was required. She quickly decided we should check out the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle.

So, after another trip on the Metro and a short walk, we found ourselves at the front door. The first thing we noticed is that the line for people without tickets is closed. Uh oh. Did our lack of planning send us on a wasted trip? When we asked, we were told to buy tickets online. This took about two minutes, and two minutes more got us into the air-conditioning.

I was quite impressed. The grand gallery is essentially a giant atrium. The floor of the atrium is filled with all the animals one would find in the African savannah. The walkways on each floor that go around the atrium had exhibits covering a variety of topics includig moths, moose, and what Paris looked like before it was Paris. The exhibits are cleverly done, and even though this museum didn’t have English text on any of the descriptive signs, we didn’t feel short-changed. A couple of times while we were there, the lights flashed and thunder boomed, simulating a storm (without precipitation, of course).

Done with the museum, we were pretty much running on empty. The temperature was 94 and my Fitbit said I’d walked over 16,000 steps already. So we headed back to the hotel.

By now we’d become fairly competent at getting around on the Metro. We’d ridden on half a dozen different lines and used nearly twice as many stations. We’d ridden on three distinct wintages of trains: one where you had to open the doors by flicking a handle, one by pusing a button, and one where the doors opened automatically. We’d been in ancient stations and (seemingly) grand new ones. The last thing we learned was how to add fares to your Navigo cards. A friendly young Parisienne gave us a lesson. That stereotype about the French being snotty to tourists? Not at all true in our experience. Everyone had been friendly.

We grabbed some carry-out for dinner and ate in our room. We also managed a minimal amount of planning: we stopped at a boulangerie and bought tomorrow’s breakfast. Somehow, then, we have defininte plans for tomorrow. We’re going to the Palace of Versailles and already have tickets.

Sunday, July 5

The portion of our vacation with AHI Travel came to a close with the drive back to Paris. They dropped us off at CDG airport, where Rainer made sure we got on the correct train to get to our hotel. We’re staying in St. Denis, rather than downtown. I probably could have picked a better location, but this one met my two requirements: I could pay part of the cost with reward points, and it’s close to a Metro station.

Google said that when we got off the train, we should catch a bus. Rainer suggested we catch a taxi instead. Unfortunately, no taxis were to be found. And, through a lack of preparation, I didn’t have the Uber app installed on my phone. So we legged it. The weather wasn’t too hot, and we didn’t have to drag our suitcases very far, so it wasn’t bad.

After an early check-in at the hotel, we went in search of food. Google let us down again – we picked a place to eat a couple of blocks away, but when we got there, we saw it was under renovation. A few doors down, we spotted a little neighborhood pizza place where nobody spoke English. Pizza is a universal language, or close enough that we can manage without difficulty.

We were hoping to be able to find a place to relax and watch the F1 race. Last year in Brussels, I had no difficulty finding a sports bar that had the race on multiple screens. F1 is big in Europe, so how hard can it be? We couldn’t get it in our hotel room – F1 is on a premium channel, which we didn’t get. And the hotel bar wasn’t open yet. So much for Plan A. After a few minutes of thought, Genae suggested we visit the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre.

We headed off on our adventure – the first task was to figure out how the Metro works. We were too stupid to figure out how to recharge the Navigo cards we used on the train from the airport. Luckily, the agent at the service desk spoke enough English to do the task for us. That was nice, but it meant we still didn’t grasp how to do this on the kiosk. Yes, you can change the language on the kiosk to English, but there’s one little thing I couldn’t figure out without seeing it done. Navigating the subway itself wasn’t any different than BART or the DC Metro, except it’s all in French.

The Basilica sits atop the summit of the butte of Montmartre. It is the second most popular attraction in Paris behind the Eiffel Tower, so getting there was just a matter of following the giant crowd. Admission is free, but there was a long queue, surprise, surprise. I had a bit of a flashback to my Brussels trip last year. I was expecting to visit an ancient building, but it’s only about a century old, like the Basilica of the Sacred Heart there. Construction for the Paris one began about twenty years prior to the Brussels one, and they were both consecrated between the World Wars.

After touring the church, I spotted signs directing visitors to see the panoramic view from the dome. The one in Brussels had an elevator, so I told Genae they probably had one here. We bought our tickets to the top only to quickly discover that instead of an elevator, we’d be climbing a series of spiral staircases totaling 292 stairs. I could imagine Genae later telling the French gendarmes, “Honestly, officer, he slipped.” She was a good sport, though, and (I think) we both enjoyed the view.

Anyone who knows me well knows I’m a collector. I collect alpine lakes and race tracks, coins and currency, books and music. Having now visited two Basilicas of the Sacred Heart, one might wonder if I’ve just started another collection. There are, it seems, about twenty churches in the world called the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Surprisingly, six of them are in the US. But, no, as beautiful and interesting as these buildings are, I don’t think I need to collect them all.

Back in St. Denis for dinner, Genae spotted a Chinese restaurant that looked good to her. It’s called Le Panda Express. No, not the American fast food chain. When she was in Paris as a teenager, she ate Chinese, so it was natural that we maintain that tradition. Who doesn’t eat Chinese food in Paris?

Saturday, July 4

Today is a “free day.” That is, we had no planned group activities. We’d have the whole day to explore Honfleur. Genae and I had very few ideas of how to spend the time. So far, the only thing we’d come up with was to take a boat tour that would get us a good look at the Pont du Normandie. That would take us an hour.

As it turned out, though, we weren’t the only couple who felt rushed or short-changed on our visit to the invasion beaches on Tuesday. Someone requested a car and driver to take them back there on our free day. Word spread, and in the end thirteen of us split the cost of a small bus with a driver for a return trip there. The plan was to mount our own invasion of Utah Beach with a return to Omaha to visit the museum there.

The weather was fine, scattered clouds in blue skies. We arrived at Utah fairly quickly, using the highway that runs a few miles inland rather than the narrow roads and streets right adjacent to the beach, as we did earlier at Juno, Sword, and Gold beaches.

I don’t know for sure that it was low tide, but the water was a few hundred yards out from the dry sands. I walked as far out as I could without getting into the puddles about halfway between the sea and the dry sand. Here we encountered some harness racers. That is, trotting horses pulling 2-wheeled carts called “sulkies”. Most of them were running over the damp sand, but one was out in the water almost to the horse’s belly.

The museum here concentrates, as one might guess, on Utah Beach. There are a couple of landing craft on display, and one of only six surviving B-26 Marauders (the only one outside of America, on loan from the Bourget Air & Space Museum). There’s an exhibit dedicated to Easy Company’s attack on the German artillery position at Brecourt Manor, depicted in the second episode of Band of Brothers.

Done at Utah Beach, it was getting on lunchtime. Rather than trying to find a restaurant that could seat and feed us in a reasonable time, we stopped at a boulangerie, and Rainer bought their supply of ready-made sandwiches. We had a choice of four different kinds, each made of a baguette with meat and cheese. I had the camembert with ham. The bread was delicious. And each sandwich was less than 4€, a bargain. We munched lunch on the bus on the way to Omaha.

Our tour coordinator, Rainer, who accompanied us on our “free day” trip and speaks six languages, for some reason struggles to say “Omaha”. It comes out “ohama”. After three or four attempts, he gets it. It is a source of amusement, not ridicule. A few folks kept saying, “Peyton Manning!” C’mon, people. Why would Europeans know who Peyton Manning is, or why he says “Omaha” so much?

At Omaha Beach, we visited the memorial on the beach before going to the Omaha Museum. “The Brave” was dedicated on June 6, 2004. People like to stand right next to it for photos, even though there’s a sign there saying to stay 3 meters away. I didn’t get any closer than that, but I can understand that most folks didn’t see the sign. I didn’t until Genae pointed it out to me.

Onward: up the beach exit road to the Omaha Beach Memorial Museum. I can hear you asking, “C’mon, Dave, another museum? How many D-Day museums are necessary?” That’s a fair question. The museums in the area are focused on events that happened in the immediate area, rather than covering the whole conflict. Aside from the historical differences at the beaches, each museum has a unique way of presenting things. The Omaha museum has a number of large dioramas demonstrating the equipment used by both sides. In addition, Omaha has a vast quantity of artifacts found in the area, both excavated from the land and found in the sea.

Every town in the area seems to have a Sherman tank parked in the town square or in the center of a traffic circle. There’s one in the parking lot of the Omaha museum. Both of today’s museums also had examples of German side arms, rifles, machine guns, and light artillery. No German tanks, though – no doubt they were all destroyed in combat. The Shermans are everywhere, though. We made nearly 50,000 of that single tank model, which is about the same as all German tank models combined.

Our second day at the beaches made up for the disappointment of Tuesday. We enjoyed our visit to the chateau and the apple farm and the rest, but our prime reason for going on this trip was to see the invasion beaches. This second day there made up for the shortfall. It was a good day.

We finished the day with the whole group over drinks, then our last group meal. Rainer was thoughtful enough to ask the restaurant if Genae could have a chicken dinner instead of the salmon. After dinner, Genae and I went in search of ice cream. We found some. My doctor won’t be happy with my next A1C results, I’m guessing.

Friday, July 3

We were back on the bus at eight this morning for our day’s travels.

First on the itinerary was the Caen Peace Memorial. As the name suggests, it’s located in the town of Caen. The town was extensively damaged during the Normandy campaign. About 35% was destroyed in combat (and more damaged), but some guidebooks give the figure as 70%. Having your city destroyed is a golden opportunity for urban renewal, so many damaged buildings were destroyed rather than repaired, and some undamaged buildings were torn down, as well.

I have issues with the rest of the name, Caen Peace Memorial. It’s a war museum. It’s a very nice war museum, which presents its material clearly and effectively. Exhibits are multimedia- artifacts, text, and videos. The exhibits are on the floor below the entry, reached on a wide spiral. As we descend, we are shown Hitler’s rise. The wall starts white, but as you descend, it turns light gray, then dark gray, and the texture goes from smooth to rough. Dark, rough times are ahead, no doubt. For the most part, it’s about the Normandy campaign. One large room is dedicated to the Holocaust. Another room covers the Pacific.

The museum is built on top of a large command bunker built by the Germans. General Wilhelm Richter’s headquarters staff (716th Infantry Division) directed operations from here during the campaign, occupying the bunker from June 5 to June 23. I was a bit disappointed – there’s very little of the bunker visible. Visitors navigate through what was a central corridor, but the passage is modern and comfortable, with several exhibits but no feeling that we’re in a bunker.

Our next stop was Les Vergers de Ducy. The estate is a large apple orchard that produces organic apple juice, hard ciders, pommeau, and calvados. After we learned a bit about how these products are made (and what they all are), we had a nice buffet-style lunch of chicken, potato salad, beets, carrots, a variety of local cheeses, with a tasty rice pudding for dessert. We also sampled all their products as well as a couple of jellies.

From there, we headed to Bayeux for a visit to the cathedral. Our guide was a wealth of information about the place – too much to retain it all. It’s of the same era as the cathedral I visited in Brussels. It was nice to have somebody telling me what I was looking at.

Construction began in the 11th century by William the Conqueror’s brother, who was made bishop at the age of 15. In the following centuries, it was expanded. Our guide explained many of the frescoes and friezes and stained glass. Each tells a story to the illiterate congregation, including the Last Supper to the resurrection in one fresco, to the assassination of Beckett in another. She kept calling them “comic strips”, which gets the point across, but there’s not a lot of comic content in these stories. Also, if you try to read them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, you’ll get the story backwards: most are read from the bottom up and alternate between left-right and right-left.

I think our visit there would have included a look at the Bayeux Tapestry if it had been on-site. It’s currently making its way to London for display in the British Museum. Our guide told us its story as well, while noting that it’s an embroidery, not a tapestry. Some wags, knowing the history of the British Museum, suggested the French might want to verify that the original was returned and not a copy.

Before returning to Honfleur, we had some time to wander through Bayeux. It’s a bit congested right now, as the town is hosting its annual Medieval Festival. We managed to find a patisserie, where we indulged in a treat called a Mont Blanc. It was decadent. If I lived in France, I’d balloon up to 400 pounds and die of diabetes. I find these little gems almost irresistible.