One advantage to living in France is that you’re never really all that far from Paris. In about  5 ½ hours we can travel from our downtown train station to one in the nation’s capital and walk from there to a hotel for that evening. With a dozen daily departures we can take our pick to be there for a 12:30 PM lunch, a 3:00 PM hotel check-in, or a 7:00 PM dinner. An overnight sleeper train would arrive in plenty of time for breakfast. That convenience means that it’s possible to make a connection and continue to a further destination such as Brittany, Champagne, or even London or Amsterdam. For today’s adventure we stayed in Paris but made a day trip into Normandy to spend the morning walking in the footsteps of artist Claude Monet in his beloved gardens of Giverny.

We left the Paris Saint-Lazare train station around 8 AM and descended in Vernon (for Giverny) about an hour later. Since the estate opened at 9:30 AM we took a taxi to get ahead so that we could be near the front of the line. Just like at any amusement park where you immediately head for the most popular roller coaster, we followed the signs for the water lily pond, perhaps the most well-known site there. Although those famous flowers wouldn’t bloom until July and August, we were happy just to stand on the iconic green arched bridge. It was easy to imagine Monet himself, brush in hand, capturing the very scenes we’d admired in Paris at the Orangerie, near the Louvre.

An underground passageway took us beneath the roadway into the other half of the estate, Clos Normand, where 100,000 flowers and plants awaited us. Granted, they weren’t all in bloom since Monet wanted color in this outdoor landscape for each season, but there were blossoms in every direction. Since this was a springtime visit, at our feet were tulips, pansies, daffodils, and forget-me-nots while above the cherry and crab-apple trees added pink and white to the display.

While we came to Giverny for the famed gardens, Monet’s house (today’s featured photo above) was a pleasant surprise. Its pink plaster and green shutters, the blue-tiled kitchen, the vibrant yellow dining room—it felt like a home still lived in, just as the guidebook suggested. And lived-in it certainly was since the artist and his wife shared their abode with eight children which could explain why his studio was moved to an exterior building!

The sun eventually chased away the rain, so we walked back to the train station in Vernon to return to Paris in plenty of time to enjoy a drink at the hotel before a bistro dinner. While we were already fans of Monet, his gardens left quite an “impression” 🙂

If you go: The taxi from the Vernon train station to Giverny was 18€ and we arrived at the group ticket gate (also used for individual online-purchased tickets) at 9:20 AM and were allowed in even with 9:30 AM tickets. The shuttle bus from the train station that arrives at Giverny at 9:40 AM would have been 10€ for the two of us but we felt that the head start on the crowds was worth it. Walking back that same distance on flat, paved walkways took about an hour.