'Son,' he said, 'grab your things I've come to take you home'

luggage for 7 months in France

Paris (week 36)

We did not do too badly, only requiring one more suitcase than we came with, and managing to keep them all under the 23kg mass limit.  The trip out to CDG airport (by metro and RER) was uneventful, our only delay before boarding the plane arising from a malfunction at the Air Canada baggage check-in (the conveyor belt to the luggage collection broke down).  We landed essentially on time in Toronto and our flight to Thunder Bay arrived on time as well, where Muumu met us.

The highlight for the boys was being able to eat at A&W in the Toronto airport.  It's not like we don't have one in Thunder Bay, but it's their favourite fast-food burger so they'd been looking forward to having it for a while.

Last day!

Paris (week 36)

We were up early to make sure we'd be able to get up the Tour Eiffel - we tried to buy tickets online a month ago, but they were already sold out.  Luckily, most of the spaces are still available for walk-ins, and we were "lucky" to have a hazy day, so we only had to wait 15 minutes to get to the second stage (they suggested the 3rd (top) stage had worse visibility, so we didn't pay the extra €20).

We then moved along the river to the Musée d'Orsay, the museum holding the Louvre's modern art collection.  It is a manageable size, and the boys (and parents) enjoyed it more than the Louvre because there is a greater concentration of famous artists.  At least, famous in that the boys have heard of them because many of the Impressionists spent time along the Riviera and in the Pays d'Aix.  Cézanne lived in Aix, van Gogh in Arles with Gauguin, etc.  There were many examples from these three artists, as well as numerous Monets, Manets, Renoirs, and Degases.  Interestingly, there is a museum-wide prohibition on photography in the d'Orsay, while the Louvre proper allows photos (even with flash) everywhere including in the Mona Lisa room.

Le fabuleux destin des MacKinnons

the red arrow is Yolanda on our balcony

Paris (week 36)

We dropped the car off and took the train into Paris for our final 2 days in France.  We decided to get a hotel in the heart of it all, and found a reasonable Aparthotel literally a stone's throw from the Moulin Rouge.  Obviously the area was bustling late into the night, and not all of the surrounding shops and watering holes are kid-friendly, but it's a neat area full of boulangeries and little restaurants.  It's also lived-in with lots of schoolchildren in the morning and laundromats and grocery stores dotted around.

David with a David, "Pierre Sériziat"

The night we arrived we entered the first reasonable restaurant we saw.  We discovered we were in the Deux Moulins, the location of Amélie's workplace in the film of the same name.  The next day we went to the Louvre (standing in line for 45 minutes, directly behind a school group from Thunder Bay's Hammarskjold High School - Yolanda recognised one of the chaperones).  David and Andrew could only last an hour, although they did manage to see the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, among others.  Yolanda continued for another couple of hours in the Louvre while the (three) boys moved on to Cinéaqua, the Paris aquarium.  It was similar to the other large aquariums we saw (including reef sharks!) in Barcelona and Toronto, but it was still interesting and contained some new things we hadn't seen before.

So, our (final) updated aquarium list is as follows:

1, 2. Canada (Ripley's Toronto & Lunenburg Fisheries Museum)
3, 4. USA (Clearwater & Duluth)
5, 6, 7. France (Cité de la Mer Cherbourg, Limoges, & Cinéaqua Paris)
8. Spain (Barcelona)
9. Monaco
10. Italy (Genoa)
11. Belgium (Brussels Public)

Two Towers

Meyreuil (and Paris) and Marseille (week 23)

Pictured here are the two tallest man-made structures in France.  On the left is the taller one, possibly recognizable to you (hint: it is is Paris).  On the right is the second-tallest structure: the chimney of the the Provence Power Plant in Meyreuil.  It is visible from anywhere along the Mont Ste. Victoire south face (including from our terrace).  I have scaled the picture to give you a feel for their relative heights, i.e. the Tour Eiffel is only a few feet taller!  Just a little bit of trivia for your reading pleasure.

The picture of the power plant is from the car travelling along the D6 highway, which we take to get to Marseille and the TGV station.  This week we had to go into Marseille to the OFII (Office of Immigration) to have our physicals for our long-term visa validation.  A Canadian passport is sufficient for multi-entry to a maximum of 90 days in the Shengen border-control area.  However, since we're staying longer than that, if we want to re-enter the Shengen zone (say, if we had to go to Canada, the U.K., or Andorra) after leaving it, we needed our visa validated.  As far as we can tell, it's main purpose is to keep tuberculosis out of the country - we had to have a medical that was a chest X-ray, a doctor listening to our breathing for 2 minutes, and a few desultory questions about whether we had daily medications.  They didn't seem to care if we had AIDS, SARS, or ebola.

Yolanda's birthday present

Paris (week 16)

The timing of our trip to Paris was to coincide with the last tennis tournament of the ATP calendar - the BNP Paribas Masters.  We all went on Tuesday (the second day of the tournament) and got to see one Canadian (Pospisil, who lost) and the world #1 (Djokovic, who won).  The facility is indoors, with 3 courts.  The main court has reserved seating (but is small enough to see everything - sort of like the lower bowl of the Metro Centre in Halifax), while Courts 1 (singles) and 2 (doubles) are very small and first-come, first-served.  So we were only 2 rows back courtside for Pospisil's match.

At left is Canada's Milos Raonic (7), who defeated Berdych (5) and Federer (2) before losing to Djokovic (1) in the final

Yolanda went by herself the next day, which we've been calling her birthday present.  She had the chance to see pretty much all the rest of the top-10 ranked male players (except Nadal, who is injured), as well as Daniel Nestor in doubles action.

Of course, going to Paris for a birthday present is more impressive if you aren't already in France, but she'll take what she can get.

"Either this wallpaper goes or I do"

Paris (week 16)

Even in Paris, posted store opening hours are mere suggestions.  The boulangerie across the street opened 20 minutes late one day, and the grocer was over an hour late the next morning.  Granted, both those days were on the weekend, but it's still frustrating when you're waiting to buy bread or milk for breakfast for your children!  If anything, it seems worse here than in Provence.  In contrast, the tourist attractions operate with a military precision.

We wandered around the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in the afternoon after dropping Nana off at the airport.  It has surprisingly good views of the city (for example, the Eiffel tower can be seen from the central chapel - provided the Seine mist has cleared).  We all took a walk through the front end, the only famous tomb we saw wasn't even occupied any more - Rossini's remains were moved to Florence, but the empty tomb was left as a memorial.  We then got kicked out at closing time.

Craig went back the next morning to see some of the cemetery's other famous residents, including Oscar Wilde (who supplied the subject quote), Edith Piaf, Jim Morrison, Bizet, Molière, various Napoleonic generals, and the deportation memorials (one for each death camp that deportees from Drancy were taken to).  Mostly, though, he spent his time trying to find the grave of Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, one of France's most famous and influential chemists.  It took three visits, consulting online pictures and three maps of the cemetery to find it - probably 45 minutes of searching - and he's right on one of the roads, just the other side of the section from where the maps show him.  I guess the moral of the story is if you want your tomb to be left alone, become a chemist.

l to r: Honoré de Balzac; Frédéric Chopin; and Grand Admiral Joachim Murat

Craig, David, and Andrew had a day on the town while Yolanda was at the tennis matches.  They went up to the top of the Arc de Triomphe (something Craig has wanted to do since 1986 - when it was closed for restoration) and visited the Salon du Chocolate (a food fair dedicated to chocolate).  The convention centre was also hosting a gaming expo at the same time, but the boys chose the chocolate show.

Nana's last day in France

Paris (week 16)

One more packed day of site-seeing before Nana heads home.  On this day we started out where we left off - on the Île de la Cité - visiting Notre Dame de Paris.  It being Sunday, mass was being held when we were there, so we got to see the priests and organ in action.  They still allow tours around the periphery, so we could still see all the chapels, the rose windows, etc.  Again, it was very busy but since the cathedral is so much larger than Sacré Cœer, there was room to move around and ponder if you wished.

After lunch at a café next to the cathedral, and some time for souvenir shopping, we made our way to the Eiffel Tower.  It was also swamped with tourists, even the lines to walk up to the second stage were long.  So we walked around and had a nice snack across the river by the fountains of the Jardins du Trocadéro, eating cupcakes we bought on a side street on the Île de la Cité.

For our final stage, we travelled to the Arc de Triomphe de l'Étoile.  We were there as the sun was setting, so we got to see the west-facing wall turn orange in the light, as well as the rekindling ceremony at the tomb of the unknown soldier.  We then ate dinner on the Champs-Élysées lucking out by getting a table with a view of the Arc de Triomphe.

The next day, we all travelled up to CDG airport to see Nana off. 

In Paris with Nana

Paris (week 16)

Sacré-Cœur

After a day of rest and packing, we all made our way to Paris for Nana's trip to the Big City (the one in France, not Caledonia).  We caught the TGV at Aix station, then used the Metro to get into the city from the Terminal 2-TGV station in CDG airport.  We are staying a stone's throw away from the Saint-Maur station in the mostly residential onzième arrondissement.  The closest big landmarks are the Bastille square (you probably know that the Bastille itself no longer exists) and the Père Lachaise (the latter is actually in the 20^e).  We used airbnb to find our apartment in Paris - Craig finds it easier to use than vrbo (a.k.a. homeaway) because the airbnb site facilitates payment (i.e. you can use a credit card). 

UPDATE: we will no longer use airbnb.  Since they have instituted "online and offline personal verification" requirements, they require extremely invasive personal identification requirements, such as scanning government ID and then correlating it with a Facebook page.... and even if you accept that (which we held our noses and tried), the verification fails.  Apparently 7 years of Facebook activity is "not sufficient" for their purposes.  Oh, you could also use gmail if you're willing to let them have access to all your Googledrive files and address books.

The first day of site-seeing took us up to Sacré-Cœur.  As you can see in the picture, the hillside was hopping with tourists, it being a weekend and during the local school break.  That made the tour through the cathedral itself a conveyor-belt affair, without much time to reflect on each chapel or statue.  The kids prefer it that way, I suppose, since they are growing tired of seeing cathedrals that all look the same to them.  It started to thin out when it started to rain....

that's the Louvre in behind

In the afternoon we made our way down to the Seine.  We wandered the grounds around the Louvre (without going in as it was close to closing time) and along a few of the bridges, before boarding the Seine boat cruise (we went with the Vedettes tour since it was at an easily-found location (at the Pont Neuf bridge right at the tip of the Île de la Cité) and they had flexible ticketing.  It was dark by 7 pm when the boat left, so we got to see the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, etc. lit up.

"I can't stop eating crêpes!"

Roissy-en-France (Day 1)

We are here!  We took the red-eye to Paris, leaving Thunder Bay at 3:30pm and arriving here at 8:30 am.  We are staying one night in Roissy-en-France (is there another Roissy with which this one would be confused?) to acclimitize.  This is the park (behind the mairie)  The boys did very well.  Andrew has immediately taken to the food, having crêpes for breakfast (hence the quote above) and bread for dinner (hence the picture below.
 

Yolanda and I had duck pizza for dinner.  Mmmmm!