From Canals to Croissants

We are back home, safe and sound.

Our last morning in Paris was pretty relaxed. We had a taxi booked to pick us up at 11:00 am to whisk us off to Charles de Gaulle airport, the big granddaddy of airports here.

Here’s Beth outside our hotel, all packed up.

Good thing we had plenty of time (3 + hours) because we needed it all. The check-in counter was at one terminal and the gate was at another. We had to take a shuttle bus with all the other Westjetters. I seem to recall we had to go though a couple of security checks as well. So when we finally arrived at the gate we had maybe 45 minutes or so to settle in a bit.

Always nice to see the “on time” statement

Well, what can I say. It was a great trip full of lots of adventures and new sites for us. People have asked us what was our favourite place. I can’t really say there was one in particular. Each location had its own feel with sites and interests specific to that area. For me, I would say some highlights would be the canals of Amsterdam, the Vimy memorial, Beaune and Colmar in France were certainly unique , and then of course Paris.
Bruges in Belgium was great, but I would say that Brussels was OK - not likely at candidate for a return trip. But I don’t regret going there at all. It is always interesting to see new places that’s for sure.

Beth’s highlights included seeing the areas where her grandparents came from in Amsterdam, all the medieval places we visited, the Van Gogh museum, shopping in Paris (especially her new purse), the bells and churches of course. And best of all, spending 4 solid weeks with me (haha).

We hope you had fun following along with us. We were happy to share our experiences, and we now have this blog to look back on and relive our trip too!

Until next time, happy travels!

OK, just thinking about where I Ieft off after the previous blog entry….
Oh yes, we (Beth and I with our friends Rob and Maggie) headed out for dinner in the Latin Quarter. It is a fun lively place with many small restaurants and shops. Beth and Maggie got sidetracked with a bit of shopping while Rob and I waited patiently outside…. And waited…. Still waiting…...Finally they emerged with bags in hand and we found a nice little place for dinner. Mario the waiter was immediately taken with the gals and we had a really fun time well late into the night

The next morning we were up and at’er to get to the Orsay Museum. Housed in a really neat old train station, the building was repurposed after being empty for quite a while. It is a great space for mainly French art from mainly 1898-1914. That would include a lot of Impressionism art by Monet, Manet, Renoir, etc.

We even found our friend Van Gogh.

After a couple of hours or so we maxed out our museum brains and metro’d back to our hotel. Beth and Maggie didn’t need too long a rest until some last day in Paris shopping was required. I believe a purse has found a new home.

Our big finale for our trip is an evening dinner cruise on the Seine. What an absolute great way to cap off our trip. Just look at these views:

And it was Maggie’s birthday to boot, look at those sparklers!

What an amazing ending to our trip. I’m finishing this entry while seated in our plane getting ready to take off. I’ll follow up with a final post.

We spent our last few days in Colmar simply chilling out and just kind of lazing around. I think we needed a bit of a rest as we will be finishing up strong at the end of our trip with a return to Paris. Colmar turned into a sleeping little town as well with many shops closed on Sunday. That’s OK with us, we’re turning into temporary locals.

Here’s a couple of foodie pics.
First off, for lunch Beth had burrata cheese and tomatoes, and I had a tart flambee (aka thin-crust pizza). There was some sharing involved.

Walking around a bit I’ll leave you with a few more shots of the town.

Like I said, we just lazed around and then soon it was time for dinner. Getting a bit tired of the same old German/French blend of choices, look what we went for. It was excellent too!

When we had previously walked around the Petite Venice area we noticed that on the bridge there were many heart-shaped padlocks locked to the railings. And, as it was our anniversary, we thought why not add a lock of our own? So we found out where to buy one (nearby souvenir shop) and off we went.

So time to get on the road. We had to check out of our pad by 11:00 am, but out train to Strasbourg (followed by a high-speed train to Paris) wasn’t scheduled to leave until 2:30. So, what to do in between? We decided to head to the train station and see if we could get to Strasbourg early and maybe explore that town for a few hours. The lady at the ticket window said, sure - no prob. So we zipped the 30 minutes to Gare du Strasbourg, locked our luggage up at the station, and headed out to explore.

There is a massive cathedral there that has somehow managed to survive all kinds of wars still fully intact. Quite impressive but it was very hard to get a good shot of it from a distance.

And some sites around the town.

Our 3 hour window zipped by pretty quickly and so we hoofed it back to the train station and soon were settled in for our 2 hour ride to Paris.
And best of all, we will be meeting up with our good friends Rob and Maggie. They just arrived in Paris as well and are starting their month-long adventure here before heading to the UK and Ireland. We are going to spend a few days with them having fun and seeing some sights. We started off by checking out our new neighbourhood and having a bite.

Here’s Beth and Maggie goofing around. Not sure where that bra came from!

The next morning Beth and I had tickets for Versailles. Rob and Maggie were planning to get acquainted with Paris for their first day, so we parted after breaky.
It was a bit of a challenging day for us. First of all, I did not schedule in Beth’s morning coffee fix early enough. My precision planning had us leave our hotel for the Metro and head towards one of the big train stations. I thought no prob, we’ll just grab a coffee there. Turns out there’s a big reno going on at the station and all we could find was a crappy little take-out place, not our usual cafe lattes and croissants start to the day. Oh-oh.
Next was a bit of a train platform fiasco. Our train to Versailles was shown to be leaving on Platform 2. OK so far so good. About 2 minutes before it was to arrive an announcement came over the speakers saying the train to Versailles will be on the “short train” platform. What the heck is that? And why doesn’t it show on the board? Just then a train came in on Platform 4. Hmmm….. is that it? I thought well, let’s just see what the locals do. Well guess what, there ain’t no locals going to Versailles, just confused tourists. Looked like most went onto that train but I was still a bit confused over that. So I asked a guy who was sitting near the door on the train. Versailles? He replied with an incomprehensible one word reply. So I asked again, Versailles? Got the same response. Geez, throw me a fricken bone here, can you nod a yes or no? Well, then the doors closed so that was that. Beth and I were still on the platform. Train gone. Turns out the “short train” platform is not #2 where the screen showed, but #4. Well then just say that!!!!
Anyway, yup, it seems that was our train.Oh well, another one schedule to come in about 15 minutes.

I watched the board like a hawk. It said Platform 4. OK sounds good.
Well guess what , it switched to Platform 2 at the last minute again! Not fooling me this time Paris train people! We boarded that one as soon as the doors opened. Finally on our way, albeit a bit late. We were not going to make the 10:00 time slot though, I was sweating a bit about that.
After 35 minuted or so we disembarked, along with the tourist hordes, and walked the 15 minutes to the chateau. There was a HUGE lineup to enter. I thought that if they gave us any grief about not being on time I would either say we were stuck in this line-up from hell, or regale them with my train platform fiasco. You know, the one I just bored you senseless with. Turned out I don’t think they care, scanned out ticket and entered we did.

We had a downloaded walking tour on our phones, so we plugged in the wireless earbuds and joined in with the throngs of tourists.
Man, it was so crowded. It made the tour through the chateau very challenging. First off, the place is extremely opulent. The rooms are heavily done with with baroque extravagance. Add that to being shuffled along through room by room it eventually got to bit a bit too much.
I did manage to capture these shots though.

And the very famous hall of mirrors. Quite something in its day.

We kept getting glimpses of the gardens outside through the windows and both thought, let’s go from here to there like right now.
They are truly immense. We had watched lots of TV shows and YouTube videos about the Versailles gardens, but to see this area in person is quite something.

We were surprised when we realized we had already been there for 3 1/2 hours. The tickets I purchased included a ride around part of the site on a rickety Choo-Choo train (on wheels over bumpy old cobblestone roads). It was a pleasant break.

By the grace of god it dropped us off back at the chateau. On our little train ride around we noticed other people had rented golf carts to explore the site. Now that is a genius idea. If any of you plan to come visit here, I highly recommend you do that.
Some last few shots of Versailles.

Feeling pretty pooped we headed for the train station to make our way back to our Paris hotel.

We’ll be catching up with Rob and Maggie to trade stories and head out for dinner. More to come on our last day in Paris tomorrow.

Well, we are really enjoying our time here in Colmar on our first day of exploring the town using as usual, our handy dandy Rick Steves guidebook. Well worth the money.

But to back it up a bit, after our visit to the Dominican church yesterday to see the Schongauer altarpiece, we wandered about the town. It is cool and crisp so we stopped by a cafe for deux chocolats chauds.

Here are some late afternoon and evening pics for you:

Our apartment is in this building, we are on the second floor but looking out the back onto a small side street.

These are the old buildings directly across from the entrance to our building:

We were off this morning to visit the Unterlinden Museum, a quite highly rated museum for a town of this size. On the short walk there we came across this House of Faces. If you zoom in you can see them all.

OK, so now the museum.What I liked about it is that it has a bit of everything. From Roman times, items from different periods (Bronze age, Iron age, etc), local Colmar history, and art through the ages, all housed in a combination of an old convent and a newer wing showcasing modern art.

First stop was to see the Isenheim Alterpiece. Created between 1512-1516, it is a series of paintings on a hinged screen system of panels. For display purposes, is has been disassembled somewhat, making it easier to view. It’s displayed in the former chapel. The portrayal of Christ is particularly gruesome but was considered appropriate based on all the various plagues and skin-related sicknesses at the time, which he understood.

Part of the original alterpiece design was this sculpture.

We wandered through the former convent area to get to another part of the museum.

Here are some neat old winemaking equipment items. You may not be able to tell from the photos, but the sizes of the timber for the press were huge.

Here’s a copy of a Rembrandt that was once displayed here (it’s now at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto).

Here’s a nice Monet sunset.

And a wee Renoir:

I liked this one, can’t recall who painted it but there’s just something about it…..

We made it to the more modern art area up this cool stairway.

And met Pablo Picasso…… well, maybe not him personally but his art yes.

Kind of goofing looking with odd-shaped facial appendage’s, but now let me tell you about the art.

Of course there was a lot more art that we saw but I don’t want to overwhelm this entry. We exited into nice warm sunshine and found a spot to refresh ourselves and relax.

AND, as the title in the entry suggests, it is our wedding anniversary today! 34 years and still talking!
We celebrated by going to a neat Alsatian restaurant and had Rosti. It is a skillet-fried concoction of shredded potatoes, cheeses, meats, etc.
And some beer of course.

The tables were closely packed and we struck up a conversation with a couple next to us. They were from Austria, but spend 1 - 2 months each year travelling around Europe. It’s quite amazing to think that only 5 -6 hours away by car you can be in a different country, with different food, cultures, etc. And the scenery can be completely different. Plus, they have also spent a lot of time in various trips to the US. I think that Europeans have a much better travel culture than us, and devote more time for that.

Also, this was one year ago that my Dad passed away. Thinking of you today Dad here in our travels.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Tomorrow we plan to just have a relaxing day in our pad here, and then we’ll be off the Paris for our final few days.

We spent our last afternoon here in lovely Beaune on a walk around the historic walls and ramparts that circle the town. A nice lady at the TI gave us a walking map and off we went. Various stops had posters with QR codes that you could scan to get more info, in English too! The weather has definitely turned brisk, so you’re going to see us in our cold weather layer duds for a while. Warm weather clothing is now at the bottom of our carry-ons.

Beth found a nice little cottage she wants along the way.

Stopped off for a bite along the way, a quiche and mushroom soup while I further studied the map. It turns out that I really don’t need the map, Beth seems to now have an amazing ability to find the little signposts and markers along the way. Just when I would say “I think it’s this way” she’d reply “nope, look…. There’s the little marker on that stone wall over there”. She’s keeping us on track!

On our way to dinner that evening we passed a barber shop. You may recall earlier on this trip that I got a beard trim in Bruges, well this time I had a barber in Beaune for a haircut. The hairdresser didn’t speak any English, and somehow I managed by pointing and gesticulating what I thought would work. She appeared to accept this as off we went. After a nice shampoo she was soon clipping away. Merci beaucoup!

Well, we finally made it to the restaurant and went with the 24 Euro three-course dinner deal. I had some toasted goat cheese, followed by the local well-known dish of Beef Bourguignon. Beth went for onion soup (French of course) and chicken in a mustard sauce. For desserts how about a chocolate cake and crème brûlée.

The town was nicely illuminated on our way back, we came across some live music in the town square.

So now we’re off to the eastern part of France called the Alsace, close to the German border. We checked out our pad and headed to the train station.

After a smooth 2 hours 20 minutes we arrived at Gare de Colmar, where we disembarked and started our 15 minute walk to meet our host. This time we are staying in an apartment, not a hotel. It will be nice to stretch out a bit and have some extra room. And after 3 weeks of travelling together so far, well……. Some separation sanity space is needed!

So, a bit about Colmar. I’m not entirely sure how it made it on the list but I recall my friend Morgan telling me a little about it. After some Googling I thought, ya that looks nice. Well, what an amazing and very well-preserved old town from the medieval ages. Luckily only the train station was bombed during the war. It is quite the collection of many rambling half-timbered buildings, all intact with the odd little canal as well.

I think the pics tell it better, so here’s a whole whack of them.

There’s even an area called “Petite Venice”. Not quite like the Big Venice, but very pretty nonetheless.

And a nice indoor market building.

We stopped into the Dominican Church, know for having a medieval masterpiece, Martin Schongauer’s “Virgin in the Rosebush”. painted in 1473.It was originally located in another church but it was stolen in 1972, subsequently recovered and moved here to be more secure under the watchful eyes of the Dominicans.

We’re now just relaxing in our apartment having lunch. There’s a real estate office nearby, look what you can get for 530K Euro. Who wants to go in on it? .

We are here for a few days, with maybe a side trip planned. So get ready for lots of pictures of rickety, half-timbered, leaning, jumbly, pretty, quaint, rambling, cute, medieval houses and buildings. They are there at every turn!

Again, thanks for your comments. It is great that you’re following along. Please let us know who’s out there with us!