As of Wednesday, October 2, we are back home in St. Petersburg, Florida. We thought we would have some "re-entry" adjustments to make, but--other than having a little trouble remembering how to operate the television controls--it hardly seems possible that we have been gone for over 5 months. The hardest thing to get used to was not having a cat to greet us upon our return.
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A neighboring boat's Abyssinian cat comes by to say
"so long" as we prepare to leave Auxonne.
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Our weekend in Paris turned out to be quite different from what we had originally planned. We couldn't do the Sewer Tour because it was closed for repairs, and we skipped Versailles because we weren't quite up to dealing with tourist crowds. Even our back-up plans ran into a few glitches. The Cluny Museum (a museum of the Middle Ages) was partially closed for renovations, and unfortunately, the closed portion included the Roman Baths that we were most interested in seeing. So scratch that. We had also hoped to visit Napoleon's Tomb in Les Invalides, a complex of buildings originally built in the late 1600's on the orders of Louis XIV to be a home and hospital for aged or unwell soldiers, and currently the site of several museums and monuments related to the military history of France. However, on Sunday (September 29), Les Invalides was the site of a public memorial for Jacques Chirac, an ex-president of France who died on September 26. Okay, on to Plan C.
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The closest we could get to the thermal baths at the Cluny
Museum was this view through the window of the museum
gift shop.
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The approach to Les Invalides was quite beautiful. The
golden dome is that of the church contained within the
complex; the highest church in Paris. If the French
presidents--"ex" and otherwise--can stay healthy, maybe
we'll get a chance to visit during our next stop in Paris.
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Plan C had us mostly walking on Saturday, several miles in fact, from our aborted attempt to visit the Cluny Museum, to the Ile de la Cite near Notre Dame, and along the "left bank" of the Seine back to our hotel in the 15th arrondissement (a city administrative district).
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After 5+ months in Europe we were finally able to have
a true "Saturday morning breakfast". Bottomless cups
of coffee and eggs, bacon, French toast--definitely not a
French-style breakfast. No surprise, we were not the
only Americans in the place.
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We were a little taken aback by how many tourists were in Paris. Our brief stop in Paris last year was in early September, in fact, on American Labor Day, just after the end of the August French holidays. There were few tourists and no lines to speak of at even the most popular attractions. We can only assume that the no-tourist season lasts for just a day--or maybe a week at most.
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Our first look at Notre Dame Cathedral after last April's
massive fire. Aside from the spire being gone, it didn't look
too bad from this angle. Lots of tourists, too.
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A vantage point on the Left Bank shows how substantial
the damage actually was. The spire is gone, the roof is gone,
many windows are gone, and scaffolding and wood
are helping to support the remaining structure.
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Notre Dame before the fire: a photo
from our visit in September 2018.
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Notre Dame after the fire: from
the same perspective as the
2018 photo.
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The Eiffel Tower at night, as seen from a street near our hotel. The
"Paris Statue of Liberty" is at the far left in the photo.
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The "Paris Statue of Liberty" is a quarter-scale
replica of the statue in New York Harbor. It
stands on an artificial island in the Seine. Originally
one of the working models for the American
Statue of Liberty, it was gifted to the city
of Paris in 1889 by the American community
in Paris to commemorate the centennial of the
French Revolution.
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Palm trees in Paris--it's almost like St. Petersburg.
Well, maybe not so much.
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Just by chance we walked by a memorial called the "Jardin Mémorial des Enfants du Vel' d'Hiv'" (Memorial Garden of the Children of Vel' d'Hiv'). On July 16 & 17, 1942, over 13,000 Jews were arrested, including 4,115 children. Families--those with children--were initially confined to the Vélodrome d'Hiver (Winter Velodrome), hence the name of the memorial garden. Deportations to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland occurred in phases in July and August of 1942. Ultimately 3900 children were deported. Of those children deported, only 6 adolescents survived.
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The statue in the memorial. Displayed within the
surrounding trees were photos and stories of some
of the children and families who were seized
during this operation.
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| A wall with the names and ages of the children who died. |
Our only successfully-executed "Plan B" activity occurred on Sunday, when we visited the Museum Marmotten Monet in a mansion in the 16th arrondissement. Thanks to a 1966 bequest to the Marmotten Museum from Michel Monet, the only child of Impressionist artist Claude Monet, the (subsequently renamed) museum now contains the world's leading collection of Claude Monet's work.
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The lines to enter the museum were getting long by the time
we finished our visit--but were nowhere near the length of the
lines to enter the Louvre Museum.
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In the latter years of his life, Claude Monet developed quite a fascination with the water lilies in his garden
in the town of Giverny (in Normandy). He painted upwards of 250 canvasses with water lilies.
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We walked uphill to reach the museum. Maybe that's
why it looked so much like fall?
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A new sight in Paris this year: electric
scooters left here, there, and everywhere. In
the past year, electric scooter ride-sharing
services have taken Paris by storm, but
one of the problems is that scooters
are being left by their users in the
oddest of places.
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On Monday morning, prior to our departure for our Paris airport hotel, we went to the Italian Cultural Institute hoping to fulfill one of Lon's "wish list" items for this Paris trip--the chance to see a reconstruction of Leonardo DaVinci's mechanical lion. The original automaton--long-since lost to history--was commissioned in the 1500's to amuse King Francis I by walking forward and placing flowers at his feet. The month-long display at the Institute pays tribute to DaVinci on the 500th anniversary of his death in 1519. Unfortunately, our trip was only partially successful. We were at the Institute during the advertised hours, but there was no staff on hand to admit us to the display.
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We could only view the lion by peeking through the window.
C'est la vie.
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On that note, we said farewell to Paris and are now ready to enter full-swing into the Florida phase of our year. We have started thinking about next year's boating season, but have made no decisions on travel dates or activities. If it's anything like this year we can plan all we want, but we'll likely end up changing things on the fly.
