France
Wow! Paris. Who would've thunk. Gretchen was very excited about being in Paris. Her knowledge of French came in very handy. It didn't sink it that I was in Paris until I was climbing the Eiffel Tower and watching the sun set over Paris from up above.
By day the Tower's sort of hideous, but by night, it's truly a beautiful symbol of romanticism. And the view from atop the Tower is also quite spectacular.
And what would Paris be without its museums and Notre Dame? As we got our first glimpse of Notre Dame, we saw a theme that would come up time and time again in our travels - Scaffolding. All in the name of the Y2K of course. Great for those who'll be visting Europe after 2000 and after, but horrible for us. Oh well, I just used my imagination to picture what a structure would look like underneath the scaffolding...and bought lots of postcards.
One day I will have to come back and visit the Louvre again. After 4 hours, G and I just couldn't take it anymore. It was just too damn big. But what a thrill it was to see so much great artwork!
Ditto about the hugeness for the Chateau de Versailles - a beautiful palace but you can keep walking and walking and walking and walking and still not be anywhere near seeing half of it.
This night, we splurged on an authentic French dinner. Gretchen picked a beautiful French Restaurant by the Arc de Triumph.
I don't think I've ever had such delicious duck nor salmon before in my life.
On a quick stop through Tours, we hit another snag in our trip. We had left our luggage at the train station but didn't realize that it wasn't a 24 hour service type of thing. But when we were ready to leave Tours and head to Bordeaux for a nice relaxing few days in wine country, we couldn't get our luggage out. It took much begging and pleading and a few teary looks before a supervisor was called in to retrieve our bags for us. Whew, we really thought that we were going to have to sleep on the streets. Off to Bordeaux...or so we thought. We missed the memo about Bordeaux hosting a wine convention so there was absolutely no (affordable) housing available for us. Closing our eyes and randomly pointing to a place between Tours and Bordeaux, we ended up in a city called Nantes where we lived in a garden shack.
Well, at least on our way to Spain we had to change trains in Bordeaux so I at least can say that I was there.
Next stop...Spain!
