Invitation To France, Vignettes-2

Chapter 3 More Paris

The Louvre collection dates from ancient times to the mid 1800s. … Musée d’Orsay is the home of French Impressionists and other works of art from about 1850 to WW I. Modern art is the realm of the Georges Pompidou Center.

… visit to the very top of the Arc–de–Triomphe. … It’s not an extremely high spot, but the view is exceptional. The traffic-scene on the circle below is itself worth the price of admission.

… we parked our RV right under the Eiffel Tower, between the tower legs, and ate lunch … lunch time in 1995 we parked … right next to the Tower, … Jim said, “Just fix lunch.”

Musée d’Orsay … Although trains came to this building until thirty years ago, neither the current map nor the streets and buildings in the neighborhood, show any signs of that

Chapter 4 Near Paris

Versailles … Emmy once put her hand on what looked like a cold marble slab and found it was actually warm, realistically painted wood — but most of what she “felt” was genuine cold marble.

On one visit we discovered bicycles for rent near the Grand Canal. Now that’s the way to see the Versailles park, to visit the Grand and the Petit Trianons (the smaller Châteaux located at the north end of the Petit Canal), and the village Hamlet, beyond.

Chartres … No other building dominates its city, as this cathedral dominates Chartres. … not suffered from the blackening, characteristic of buildings in major industrial areas.

It almost seems we accumulate two loaves of stale bread for each new loaf we buy, so Emmy is known to ducks and swans all over France as the “Stale Bread Lady.”