Tag: Americans in Carcassonne

Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Monet’s Giverny

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.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Clisson + the Apocalypse Tapestry

Nantes had served as our home base for a couple of day trips to the Atlantic coast and now it was time to explore a bit more inland. Our travels took us to a picturesque town nicknamed “the Tuscan village of France,” and then on to Angers, home to the world’s largest surviving medieval tapestry. These train journeys were even shorter than the others, only about 30 minutes each, but like the previous ones everything we wanted to see was within a short walking distance from the station. 

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Travel in France & beyond

Coastal charm: Pornic and Le Croisic

Instead of arriving by train, we could have sailed down the Loire River—which runs through Nantes (the city featured in last week’s blog post)—out to the Atlantic Ocean and onward to today’s two destinations. To the south, we’d read that Pornic was “a classic seaside resort town,” with its harbor, beaches, and coastal walks offering a relaxed atmosphere and beautiful scenery. North of there was Le Croisic, a working port town that “provides a more rugged coastal experience,” as you might expect from a fishing harbor and wild coastline. Despite their differences, both towns charmed us, each offering a distinct experience within a similar coastal theme.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Riding an elephant in Nantes

We’d been to Nantes before but only as an overnight stop between trains, never venturing much further than to a hotel right outside of the station. Now we were going to spend a week there, with plenty of time to explore this historic city and discover some of its Breton heritage, from the Château des Ducs de Bretagne to the numerous museums and the beautiful Jardin des Plantes. Given that our vacation apartment was a 5-minute walk from that château, that would have been a logical starting point for our first day but we had loftier plans in mind.  That is, the Great Elephant (featured photo above) at the Machines de l’île, standing 12 meters (39 feet) high, 8 meters (26 feet) wide and 21 meters (69 feet) long!

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Life in France

In hot water

When we bought our house about 9 years ago, it came with a tankless water heater that had only been installed 5 years prior. This was something new for us because in the US we had always had a tall, well-insulated tank (the bigger, the better) hidden away in a closet, in the basement or in the attic. Now, in the kitchen, in full view, hanging on the wall, was a relatively small box with 5 pipes sticking out of it to supply “endless” hot water to the faucets, shower head, and radiators scattered around the house. It takes a pump to circulate that water upstairs and down and we had already replaced it twice since we had lived here so when that familiar knocking sound returned we knew it was time for a replacement of the heating system.

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Life in France, Travel in France & beyond

Dutch tulips in French fields

We’ve been to the Netherlands a few times and on any of those visits that happened to be in the early spring we were always on the lookout for blooming tulips. In fact, on one trip at exactly this week of the year we went twice to Keukenhof, described as “The most beautiful spring garden in the world”. They showcase 7 million spring-flowering bulbs with probably none better known than the tulip. There are express buses that go directly from downtown Amsterdam to the garden, some passing by endless fields of yellows, reds, pinks, and purples, and maybe even the elusive black flowers. What we didn’t realize until recently was that some of those bulbs that end up in the Netherlands actually start out here in France.

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Travel in France & beyond

Marseille in 3 days

One of the nicknames for Chicago is the “Second City” based on its rivalry with New York regarding population, theater, restaurants, food and drink. When we lived there we found it less intimidating and just as vibrant as the “Big Apple”. In a sense, France also has a “Second City” although we’ve never heard of Marseille being referred to that way.  From what we’ve read, however, the residents of this country’s oldest city might argue that it’s just as impressive as Paris. To get a firsthand experience, we spent a few days there last week to check out the historic sites, the museums, the shopping, the neighborhoods, and the general feel.

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