May 15, 2006

2 Exhausted 2 Write Quint-ennial Vacation

"Sometimes it's better to lose your map anyway
You may end up where you were going
Instead of where you thought you were" – kendall brown
I printed 42-page itineraries for Gramma, the twins, and Alan and I so everyone would know where we were going and where we had been. The first page was headlined with the above quote. When I told people about the itineraries I was pouring so many hours and effort into, I said I knew God was laughing as I laid our plans. What I didn't know was that the angels watching me over God's shoulder as I laid our plans were laughing so hard they wet themselves.
April 28 - April 30, 2006 | May 1 - 3, 2006 | May 4 - 5, 2006 | May 6 - 7, 2006 | May 8 - 9, 2006
May 10 -11, 2006 | May 12, 2006 | May 13, 2006 | Mother's Day, May 14, 2006 | May 15, 2006 | May 16 -17, 2006
European Hitchhikers We Picked Up '06 | Europe 2006 Archive | Newsletter Archive
So here's how it went down May 15 (You don't have to read any of the words! You can just look at the pictures. There will be no test.) :
MONDAY May 15

Mark Twain, on speaking French "Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles."

Among this day's objectives was to show our Paris newbies the St-Martin canal locks via guided tour boat.

Dat Dingaling took the wheel on the boat in which we toured the St-Martin Canal. Then the actual pilot/captain steered us into the tunnel visible below the July Column. The July Column (Colonne de Juillet) which commemorates the events of the July Revolution (1830) stands at the centre of the Place de la Bastille.

We used the Canauxrama tour departing at 9:45 a.m. from the Marina Arsenal. Maybe that's why Nikki looks glum in all our photos: it was too early.

Or that the beginning of the tour took us through the long dark tunnels linking the arsenal to the Canal St-Martin.

At least there were light shows in the tunnels!

She may or may not have been impressed that the canal was opened in 1825 after Napoleon had ordered the artificial waterway dug to supply Paris with water. Kilory was very impressed with the locks.

Or that the canal narrowly escaped being filled in and paved over for a highway after traffic had dwindled to a trickle in the 1960s.

She may or may not have been impressed that the Hôtel du Nord is the setting for a 1938 French cult-classic film (which I cannot yet get on Netflix).

Or that the canal is featured in the 2001 movie Amélie where Amélie Poulain enjoys skipping stones at the locks of the canal; where once upon a time Amélie's suicidal goldfish was granted its wish for freedom. I didn't see any previously suicidal goldfish in the water...

She may or may not have been impressed that the some ivy-covered houses and totally cool French graffiti line the Canal St-Martin. Well, it's French graffiti depicting Marilyn Monroe. Does that make it American graffiti? No, that's a movie...

Well...I must admit that this day was not Nikki's day. Read on.

We arrived at the Quai de la Loire in the Bassin de la Villette around noon.

The métro station there connected us quickly to Montmartre.

We bought sandwiches and sat in the playground below the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, ate them, and watched little children on the carousel. I soon became one of the little children as one of my things-to-do was ride a carousel.

Lunch didn't take long. The pigeons helped us eat our sandwiches. Boy, did the pigeons help us. Here, Gramma and Kilory sport the finest Parisian shoe accessories. This is the photo with the least birdware so one can see what's happening.

Gramma and Nikki were interested in touring the tourist/hawker/thief-infested Sacré-Cœur Basilica. Not that there's anything wrong with that! Kilory was more interested in looking for a micro-Geocache located in a garden below the Sacré-Cœur with Alan and me, who have already done the tourist/hawker/thief-infested Sacré-Cœur thing. So we split up for one hour. It was amazing how noisy the "front" side of the hilltop was, compared to the "back" side of the hilltop. It was really quite wonderful.

In following the GPS info, Kilory and Alan were quite determined we must climb up the hill to the "garden" and I was correctly sure we must go around the hill. So I stood below and took pictures of them ascending toward the back of the Sacré-Cœur. Naturally Kilory did it the hard way; Alan took the stairs.

After we finished coming 'round the mountain we came upon the secluded garden (who knew there was anything secluded on Montmarte?!). A musician nearby quietly played his acoustic guitar. I found the micro-Geocache almost immediately under a wisteria arbor heavy with aromatic blossoms and buzzing bees. I'm sure Gramma and Nikki enjoyed the Sacré-Cœur, but I wouldn't trade our experiences.

When we met them back at the Sacré-Cœur swarming with tourists, hawkers, and noise, we got on the roller coaster ride that is the Montmartrobus. "We're all going to die!" one wants to yell as one hurtles up and down Montmartre around hairpin turns. There is only enough room to pass through the cars parked on each side of the steep crooked paths if each and every passenger sucks in their breath so hard their left and right sides merge. "Have we killed Gramma yet?"

We teetered off the Montmartrobus long enough for the world to stop spinning and to take a photo of the Moulin de la Galette of Van Gogh and Renoir fame.

We got back on the Montmartrobus to make our way to the Cimetière de Montmartre.

Edgar Degas (1834-1917), Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), Alexandre Dumas the Younger (1824-1895), etc. reside there.

I indeed wanted to see these internments, and believe that everyone should experience a European urban cemetery.

Alan and Kilory were more interested in finding the Montmarte cemetery Geocache I'd found on the internet, than in soaking up the ambience.

European urban cemeteries are like nothing else.

Here we have the Ensault-Pelterie family crypt and the stained glass within photographed through the crypt's ornately wrought door.

In 1844 Alexandre Dumas the Younger moved to Saint-Germain-en-Laye to live with his father (author of The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask). There, he met Marie Duplessis, a young courtesan who would be the inspiration for his romantic novel, La dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias). Adapted into a play, it was titled in English as Camille and is the basis for Verdi's 1853 opera, La Traviata. He is buried here only some 100 metres away from Marie Duplessis.

La dame aux camélias was Sarah Bernhardt's signature role. She laughed no end that in English it was called Camille, for there is no one named Camille in it.

Cemeteries had been banned from Paris since the shutting down of the Cimetière des Innocents in 1786, as they presented health hazards. Several new cemeteries replaced all the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital, in the early 19th century: Montmartre in the north, Le Père Lachaise Cemetery in the east, Passy Cemetery in the west and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south.

Located west of the Butte, near the beginning of Rue Caulaincourt in Place Clichy, the cemetery in the Montmartre quarter of Paris is built below street level in the hollow of an old quarry with its entrance on Avenue Rachel under Rue Caulaincourt.

Lovely Cimetière de Montmartre information. You can't see Kilory's face in this from-above photo, so just look at the funerary statue to the right for a general idea as how the Geocaching was going. Other Geocachers had said the GPS coordinates were a little off so we didn't lose too much courage when we kept coming up against a brick wall (literally). It wasn't until Nikki got into nettles searching for the cache, and we gave up, that we discovered we were in a famous cemetery, but not the correct Montmartre cemetery. It wasn't just the nettles: this was our last cache to find that would be big enough to house Nikki's travelbug hitchhiker. We'd also hoped to drop Dat Dingaling off here, too. (See expression on funerary statue.)

We got on the métro and headed for Rue Cler for another chance at dinner at Rick Steve's favorite Rue Cler eatery, the Café du Marché. The place is always full of Stevies so I think it should just be called "Rick's" [play "As Time Goes By" right here].

I bought raspberry vinegar across from the Café du Marché at a grocery store. All I needed was vinegar for Nikki's nettle burns, but who wants to bring home plain garden-variety vinegar from Paris? I doused a napkin with it and wrapped her nettled wrist. She said the pain stopped almost immediately.

At left: Kilory's unique choice in depicting us walking through the Champs de Mars toward the Eiffel Tower.

The Champ de Mars is a large public green-space in Paris, France, located in the 7th arrondissement, between the Eiffel Tower to the northwest and the École Militaire to the southeast.

The name means "Field of Mars", from Mars the Roman god of war, because it was originally used for military training. It was named after the Campus Martius of Rome.

Nikki took this photo of the gang, then I quickly and sloppily Photoshopped her in from another photo in front of the Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower was built for the International Exhibition of Paris of 1889 commemorating the centenary of the French Revolution. A petition of 300 names - including those of Maupassant, Emile Zola, Charles Garnier (architect of the Opéra Garnier), and Dumas the Younger - protested its construction.

Nikki and I had no desire to go to the top of the Eiffel tower. I didn't want to go up it at all: been there, done that, still suffer from fear of heights. But they wouldn't let me stay below and write in my journal.

Nikki and I only wanted to go half-way up. We could be happy at the first level. Noooooooooo. They made us go to the second level.

The second level had two levels: a lower encased level and an upper open-air level. As soon as the elevator let us out, Nikki and I made for a bench as far away from the windows as possible, sat down, and waited for Alan, Kilory, and Gramma to finish so we could go back to the first level. Why they couldn't have just left us at the first level, I still don't know. It took them forever upstairs. Yes, they took pictures. Yes, they gawked. Yes, Kilory could stick her head out between the wires if she took her glasses off and replaced them once her head was through. But mostly: they were watching a soccer game taking place on the ground, while Nikki and I waited below, anxious to lower our elevation.

Once we were allowed to go below Nikki and I were able to manage taking pictures of the City of Lights. I don't know why the left wing of the Trocadero wasn't lit, but it still makes for a sort of good photo.

We were all tired, but Nikki especially so.

Once on glorious ground again we were deterred from walking to the Bir Hakeim métro station which I knew to be the closest open station.

The buses were no longer running.

So we walked and walked and walked to the Invalides RER station, the sign for which I could not find in the dark.

So we walked and walked and walked (past the Petit Palais which had a light show going on inside) to the Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau métro. Nikki was so foot-sore and exhausted and thirsty and hungry she had been silently crying since the (apparently) invalid Invalides RER. I promised her (very expensive) orange juice from a métro vending machine and that fortified her enough to get her to the station.

And you thought she looked pitiful on the tour boat.

April 28 - April 30, 2006 | May 1 - 3, 2006 | May 4 - 5, 2006 | May 6 - 7, 2006 | May 8 - 9, 2006
May 10 -11, 2006 | May 12, 2006 | May 13, 2006 | Mother's Day, May 14, 2006 | May 15, 2006 | May 16 -17, 2006
European Hitchhikers We Picked Up '06 | Europe 2006 Archive | Newsletter Archive

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