Pain et Beurre Chaque Jour

Sunday, Aug. 1, 2010

Instead of regaling you with more of the wonderful things we have been seeing and doing, I thought I’d write a bit about the REAL reason I have come to Paris… food!

Now, if you know me, you know that I would not really be classified as a “foodie” because I am pretty much willing to eat anything – high brow, low brow, peanut butter or filet mignon – and can enjoy them all equally well. You may also know that I do not especially like to cook. I do cook for my family and try to provide a balanced diet and lovingly cooked meals, but that is because I love my family and not because I like to cook. Well, here in Paris there is always someone, somewhere cooking something lovely and delicious if you are willing to pay the money for it. We have found lots of lovely things and have some pictures to prove it. We have also done cooking on our own because we are not always willing to pay for someone else to do the work. In fact, we even brought a suitcase full of cereal, some tuna (Morgan sacrificed for the greater good here because one of the cans of tuna leaked a bit of tuna juice in her suitcase - interesting perfume!) and even (quelle horreure!) ramen noodles. We have not eaten the ramen but do eat our cereal with lait en boite for breakfast. Here is some info about our food adventures…

Grocery shopping – there are lots of little grocery stores sprinkled through every neighborhood. They are usually a Monop’, G20, Carrefour (big sponsor of the Tour de France) or a larger Monoprix. We do a lot of our basic shopping there – like nutella (yes, that is a staple for us!), milk (the milk comes in boxes and is not refrigerated until you open it because it has gone through an ultra-high temperature pasteurization process). I really like the taste of the milk but not everyone does. The fruit and vegetables at the small stores are more expensive than you can find in a street market. There is a street market just around the corner from us on Tuesdays and Fridays. We bought fresh lettuce, tomatoes, apples, bananas, melons and peppers at a much lower price than in the little stores. There is also cheese, fish, some cooked foods (Arabic food at our market), specialty sauces and olives, flowers, clothes and jewelry. It was so much fun to buy our produce there. When it comes to cooking, the difficulty for me has been finding and buying meat. It is difficult to buy at the market because it is all packaged and cut differently than I am used to seeing, and there was no beef – only chicken and fish. I have not found a local boucherie yet and would be a bit intimidated to ask for something. The meat in the small stores is very expensive and comes in small packages. We have purchased some hamburger and some chicken breasts, but we’ll have to see what else we can find. The oven in the apartment is also a microwave/conventional oven unit so I am not sure I could even cook a roast in it if I found one and was willing to pay for it. When we got out to eat, we usually try to find something with a larger serving of protein because that is a bit lacking in our diet (don’t worry – certainly NO danger of starving to death!) We found out last night however that it is truly true that the French like their meat much more rare than we do! Even Heather’s hamburger steak was red in the middle after asking for it to be medium.

Meat may be a bit tougher for me to come by, but the bread, oh the bread, AND the butter. I told many of you that we were going to eat baguettes and butter everyday while here and so far so good! We have found several different boulangeries (bread stores) to buy baguettes, croissants, pain au chocolat, etc., etc. The best baguette so far was one I bought at the market. The butter is wonderful – such a fresh, sweet and light taste. Yummmm. When we are out seeing museums, etc. we also have the chance to buy things for a picnic lunch or find a crepe, sandwich or gyro to eat (lots of Greek places here). We are still on the hunt for a good place to eat boeuf bourgyogne (sp?) for Morgan – that is one of her goals while here because she spent a whole Saturday making that dish once. It’s good to have a goal isn’t it? We also carry a lot of water with us because a can of pop is usually 1.50 euros (about 2 dollars) and when you times that by five people, water tastes very good.

I am sure there will be more info on food throughout the blogs, but just know that I am being good to my word and eating some “baguette et beurre chaque jour.”

Au revoir,

Terri

Museum Madness

It’s Kara and I’m talking about yesterday, July 28^th. It was a day on the go because on July 27^th Mom and Dad got a two-day museum pass. To make the cost of the museum pass worth while you had to see at least two museums each day. Simply put, today was the last day to cram as much sight-seeing and very-old-object-examining in as possible. The reason that Mom and Dad each got a pass and us kids didn’t was not because we didn’t want to see the museums or because they were tired of us but because kids under 18 are free in most museums. It’s nice knowing that we aren’t costing money and it’s also nice to be a kid again even if it’s only a technical title.

We got up, got ready, and headed out the door at a pretty good time of morning in order to accomplish as much as possible in our tourists’ quest. A ride on the metro and some walking got us to our first stop of the day: The Orangerie museum. This museum was actually built for the Water Lilies collection by Monet, his last great work of art. Once in we went straight to the first room covered in giant stretches of oil paint ponds. They are truly amazing! There are two oval rooms with four walls (separated by doors). Each wall is fitted with a huge painting. They are six feet tall and so long they’re hard to fit in a picture. They are painted with bright colors and are very interesting to study close as well as enjoy from farther away. Our Rick Steve’s book provided us with lots of extra info that gave some background and better understanding of the thought process behind each of them, which made the paintings all together more fun to see. I wasn’t aware that the museum had a whole collection of art other than the Water Lilies as well, which we then proceeded to view.

Next was the Cluny museum. Thankfully it is a museum displaying objects other than paintings or we may have been losing interest after the art museums of the day before plus the Orangerie. This museum and its contents have medieval and ancient history behind them. It is made up of three buildings, one being a home, another a chapel and the last being ancient Roman thermal baths! The audio guides were only one Euro, so we each rented one. They took Mom’s ID as a ransom to make sure we returned all of the guides at the end of our tour. We got to see some pretty interesting things. Old church benches and the decapitated stone heads of the Kings of Judah. I was excited to see these because I’d heard a lot about them when we went to Notre Dame. If no one has wrote this on the blog before me, the heads were originally on bodies of biblical kings. You can still see these bodies right on the front of Notre Dame, but they have (relatively) new heads these days because the Kings of Judah were also taken to represent the French Kings and during the Revolution while the people were hacking off the heads of their real flesh-and-blood monarchs, they decided to go for the statues too. The heads were buried and only recently discovered in someone’s garden. (I can hardly imagine the heart-stopping shock going out to dig a hole for some tomatoes and finding a huge stone head staring back at you!) We saw the Roman bathes as well. Dad keeps making fun of Mom for going crazy over really old things like this, but it’s easy to see why. The day before we got to see some old Roman ruins under ground. I couldn’t get over the little doorways and steps. Someone actually walked there. Someone that lived in a completely different world, yet walked in the very spot that you stand. And here we saw a whole room intact. We even saw one of the baths in pearly-white condition.

We wandered through the building sopping up the insightful information pouring out of our headphones. I had a piece of paper that held a chart of what numbers to enter into our audio guides and we had successfully made it through numbers 1 through 14 on the front page. Heather and I thought we were doing pretty good until I realized the paper folded out to reveal numbers 15-52. I just stared stunned for a minute. How in the world were we going to get all of these done? Heather on the other hand was not as quiet about it. This was not going to work for her. Me neither! We decided it was time for some skipping. We walked thought the museum looking at everything but only listening to the interesting-looking ones. A whole rooms was closed temporarily which also helped cut some time. One of the rooms we had to stop at though, was the unicorn tapestries. These are very famous, in case you didn’t know. They’re very large. Six of them portraying a girl, the same princess, going through the five senses. Taste, sounds, sight, touch, and smell. A whole tapestry for each. They’re very detailed, very old, and quite impressive. The thing is, there are six tapestries and five senses. No one knows for certain what the sixth tapestry represents. It shows the girl placing a necklace in a chest. Knowledge, heart, and even a sixth sense plus a couple more options have been presented as interpretations of the scene. Perhaps mystery is part of the fun and part of the fame. (Where would the Mona Lisa be without her mysterious smile?) And perhaps it’s an even stronger tie with the people of the past. Even if the days of real horse-powered transportation and manual labor seem simpler, the people thought just as deeply. Who knows what the thought process was? Maybe it is one of our interpretations, maybe it’s something completely different, or maybe they just wanted to keep us guessing!

We eventually did finish up the Cluny museum and we were hungry for lunch! We had packed a picnic lunch of sandwiches, cookies, and apples. Now we just had to figure out where we were going to eat the food which started to look better and better as time went on and the clock fell farther and farther away from normal lunch time. After Mom studied the map for some time we set ourselves in the direction of the Luxembourg Gardens and started walking. It really wasn’t too far a walk, happily proving wrong Mom’s warning that it would be a long distance. The park was beautiful and REALLY big. There was grass and trees and paths (And plenty of pigeons.) We ate on a bench (Glorious food! Yum Yum Yum!) then continued to explore the park. It had everything! A nice large fountain, tennis courts, lovely flowers, bathrooms (for 40 cents) and even a wading pool! We pulled up some chairs under a tree by the fountain. Miniature boats sailing in the water of the expansive fountain caught our eye. Kids ran around the fountain with big sticks. You give the boat a good push with the stick, it sails in the wind and you wait until it reaches another side so you can catch it and push it again. Heather was the most interested and went right up to the rental place to find out about prices. It was only two Euros to rent a boat for half an hour, about $2.60 in our money. It was a good price but we figured that we better leave now if we were going to climb the towers of Notre Dame (our next plan). Mom wanted to rest any way so she gave us a couple Euros and we got a boat for half an hour! They’re very small for boats of course, but they’re large enough to be a good weight. We hoisted the boat up and after several pictures with our sail boat, placed it in the water. Heather got to push it first and it sailed majestically through the fountain and promptly crashed into a small house near the middle built for the ducks. Thankfully those things do not tip over! It freed itself and we chased it across the fountain. We took turns pushing it and had a fun fairly non-thinking half an hour. You really only have to worry about which way the boat was going and we actually got to run around. We’ve been doing a ton of walking but not much running just for fun. It was also AWESOME because it was sunny! It was the first day it’s been fully shining sun since we got to Paris! This was also the first bit of lounging we’ve done in Paris. Really we’ve just been trudging around the side walks. Seeing awesomely cool things, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not quite as glamorous as the word “Paris” leads one to believe. This park felt like the glamour. Finally! =)

An hour after turning our boat in (we stayed there for much longer than planned) we walked out of the park. We turned our mind and our feet toward Notre Dame. Mom and Dad have gone up the towers before and weren’t going to do it again but Morgan, Heather, and I planned to arm ourselves with cameras and a bottle of water and climb each step of the nearly 400 stairs to the top. This climb cost money but it was covered by the museum pass plus us kids would probably be free anyway. We arrived at the side door where you have to enter the tower and we were met with disappointment. The tower closes at 6:30 but they let the last person go up at 6:00. It was now 6:20. Maybe we lounged in the park too long. At least we have time on our side. There’s always another day.

If we couldn’t climb Notre Dame today we just had to climb something else with a lot of stairs, so we continued in a different direction to the Arc de Triomphe. It was pretty impressive as well. It’s a very tall building but our first thoughts were turned not to the building itself (though we did take advantage of the photo op) but actually getting to the grand structure. Between us and it stretched a round-a-bout that we guessed was nearly eight lanes wide. It gets better. I say we guessed it was about eight lanes because there were no paint lines or any form of lanes at all! Cars drove as they please weaving through the traffic. All kinds of vehicles whizzed by and more rushed in from several entrances around the circle. We weren’t allowed to cross the street and of course there were no cross walks. We had to cross underground. After wandering around for a bit trying to figure out exactly how to go about this we found the entrance to the underground passage right to the Arc. We went down and got our tickets. The museum passes covered Mom and Dad but we had to wait in line for our free tickets. While waiting in line we over heard a conversation that I thought was quite funny. There were two 17 year old boys. They’re under 18 so they’re still free but kids aren’t allowed to go up without an adult, which they weren’t aware of. (I wouldn’t think about something like that either.) One of the boys talked a guy into getting their tickets for them to make it look like they were going up with him. It was pretty funny and their plan worked even thought the ticket lady knew they weren’t actually with their new “dad” since she had talked to them before. We got our tickets without a hitch and started up the stairs. It actually wasn’t a straight shot to the top. You would go up a few flights of stairs and then there was a floor of history and details about the Arc. We looked around at that and then continued up. We were at the top before we knew it. We all agreed it wasn’t half bad, and it has more than half the steps of Notre Dame, so Notre Dame shouldn’t be too bad! (Morgan has figured that going up and down Notre Dame will be like climbing from the basement to the fourth floor of Stadium High School four times. Oh fun.)

The top of the Arc was a lot of fun. We took pictures of the awesome view. You could see everything! We also took a lot of pictures of ourselves. We hung around up there for a while then went all the way back down to see the burning flame of the Unknown Soldier monument. It was nice.

Our day ended with going out to dinner. Our food was OK overall. Heather loved hers, though! She got a giant POT of mussels with cream sauce! Everyone but me tried one and said they were pretty good. They tried to get me to eat one but I am just not a seafood person and I don’t see that changing anywhere in the near (or distant) future. After dinner we retired to our little apartment, which is becoming more and more of our home though we miss our family, friends, and dogs back in Washington.

Sorry for the SUPER long blog but if you expected short from me you are sorely mistaken. Me writing long things is just how it works, you should know that about me so if you didn’t before now you do. =) Overall I’m having a great time in Paris. Like I said before, it’s not really glamorous (this day was definitely the most fancy we’ve had) but it’s interesting. There’s so much history and so much to see. We’ve seen places where famous kings, artists, and even ancient people have lived and worked. It’s such a great way to get close to and involved in history. I am just so glad we don’t have to literally walk in their shoes because even with modern-day footwear my feet are killing me! We absolutely love to get comments, so even if you just skim over the blog or look at the pictures, it would be awesome if you could drop a hello. I have just been informed that you can’t comment if you don’t have a blog account, so if you’re in the non-blog owners group (I don’t blame you) you could send your hellos and comments to our Mom’s e-mail at TPhipps909@aol.com and she’ll read them out loud. We will make her. =) Alright, well that’s all from me. Thanks for reading and have a great day.

Au Revoir,

Kara

A Pocketful of Pictures

The view from our apartment

Hmmm... no wonder this picture wasn't on the apartment ad. Kara has very accurately dubbed this the "Cow Closet."

Can you say YUM?

Versailles bike tour

Our first French crepe!

In our extremely fashionable rain ponchos at Versailles.

The famous Hall of Mirrors

Marie Antoinette's bedroom. She had the wall tapestries changed with every season and this is the summer tapestry.

Gardens at Versailles

Our Metro stop

Sacre Coeur

The beautiful Montmartre neighborhood

Moulin Rouge

Notre Dame

One of the rose windows

Nutella is pretty much the best food ever and there is no lack of it here in Paris! :)

We waited here for almost three hours in order to see the Tour riders.

Here they come! The riders whizzed by eight times.

The Eiffel Tower!

Notre Dame

The Seine in the evening

Very impressive stained glass in Sainte Chapelle

Sainte Chapelle

One of the six Lady and the Unicorn tapestries

The Luxembourg Garden

Our little boat

Sunset from our apartment window

I think we ate too many baguettes.

Kara is obviously suffering from the same problem ;)

This is the same gargoyle we have at home! Dad brought our model back from Paris several years ago.

Our best gargoyle faces

The view from the top of Notre Dame

Everywhere you look in Paris there is something beautiful to see!

Bonjour! Morgan here, and I have been given the assignment of posting some of the pictures I've taken thus far. Let me just say, Paris is awesome! I am so glad that we're here for four weeks because there is so much to do, see, and experience. I'm sure I will be doing a post soon but in the meantime enjoy the photos!

The Pigeon Slayer Conquers Paris - Sat. 7/24

Hi!!! This is Heather and I am writing about our terrific day involving Notre Dame, Scare Course, Crepes and pigeons! The day started off with us getting up pretty earlier because none of us were used to the time difference. So we headed to the Metro were we would be catching a ride to a market Andrew had told us about. We got on the metro and we took off. But on the next stop there was a massive group off people waiting to get on! And i'm thinking, “Its ok we will all fit no big deal!” So the get on. We ride to the next stop. And by the way the temperature is rising. This stop has an even bigger group of people and i'm thinking! “This is impossible” the doors open people rush in they push the y shove and if dad weren’t holding on to me I problem would’ve been pinned to the wall! Finally the doors open and we get out! Sweet Sweet air! Never have I seen so many people compacted into a small space! So we keep walking in pursuit of the market! But all we find is a few stores that aren’t great. so we stop for lunch and got yummy pita sandwiches! Next we decided to climb up to Sacre Coeur maybe climb is a underestimate! Perhaps scale hustle up journey ! what I mean is there are stairs that lead up to a gaint beautiful church. And these staris are some long serious steep stairs! So we climbed up the stairs and the view that awaited us was more then worth it! You could see all off paris even the eifle tower! Then we went inside Sacre Coeur and saw the beautiful mosaics on the ceiling off Christ and we saw all the candles and It was very cool to see all the statues and paintings. After the Sacre Coeur we wandered around in a cute little town of Monmartre full of Artist, crepes and plenty of old houses. We walked around a little market with pretty art. And Kara found a picture of the Eifle Tower she wanted to buy! Then we strolled along the cobblestone streets and browsed the shops. Soon our feet started to hurt so we got on the metro and headed to notre Dame. The one thing all 5 off us said when we saw notredame was “WOW” when you stand farth enough back you can take it all in and itss beautiful! We sat outside some and their were pigeons EVERYEHERE!People would put bread in their hands and the birds would fly in and sit on their han eat bread then fly off! Let me tell you it was Bird Central! Kara and me walked around and looked at Charlemine a big statue in the courtyard of Notre Dame. Kara and I were joking don’t hit the pigeons! Because I had a rubber band I was flinging into the air! When Kara turned around to study the statue I jokingly (not on purpose no matter what my family tells you) lifted my rubber band as if to hit one of the pigeons. Suddenly my rubber band slipped it flew throe the air and hit that bird squarely on the back! It looked around stunned then flew away in a flurry!!! Just then Kara turned around and saw me standing there dumbfounded that I actually hit the pigeon. With my rubber band on the floor! All this only happened in the course of 3 seconds! I told all this too my family who have now kindly dubbed me pigeon slayer! So with that we went in to Notre Dame and saw the beautiful statues the amazing arches and breathtaking treasury! We were all tired so we rode the metro to pizza Pinos a restaurant by our apartment! Which was really yummy then we went home and fell asleep! Over all it was an amazing day full of adventure and apparently pigeon slaying!

As close as we'll ever get to Lance Armstrong...

July 25, 2010 – Sunday

We are still adjusting to the time change which means most of us are waking up about 2 or 3 in the morning and finding it difficult to go back to sleep. It makes it easier to get up in the morning for now. Given our penchant for sleeping in however, I am sure we will adjust and I’ll have to drag people out of bed fairly soon!

We were able to find the church this morning only because there were a group of other toursists outside the building that looked like they were also looking for the Mormon church. We all had a nice chat – there were members of the church there from the Netherlands (I didn’t bring up recent World Cup games), Texas, and Thailand. Everyone spoke at least a bit of English however so we had fun talking with them. The church is an unmarked building on a side street which you would not know existed unless you knew it was there. Eventually some missionaries opened the door and we all filed into an open courtyard with the chapel and classrooms along the sides. We joined a Sunday School class (in English) that was already in progress and enjoyed the lesson given by an American living here who works for a security company. There was also a Sunday School class being given in French and one in Chinese. After Sunday School we moved into the chapel, which is actually divided into two separate rooms. We sat in the main chapel where everything was done in French. There was a simultaneous English translation that you could listen to in person in the other room, or sit in the main chapel with earphones to hear the English translation. Steve and the girls used the earphones and I was able to follow almost everything in French. One of the missionaries gave the first talk, and the missionary was Elizabeth Smart. Let that one sink in for a moment… It was rather sobering for me to listen to her give a fairly simple talk in OK French (not that my French is any better, but I don’t think she has been in Paris very long and here she was giving a talk to about 180 people). Of course we don’t know her personally, but do know more about her life than we probably should because of her kidnap and return to her family. It struck me that if you did not know anything about her, you would just see a pretty young woman working to speak French and giving a simple talk about keeping the Sabbath Day holy. But then you realize, that she probably has a greater strength and a greater knowledge of knowing what it is like to depend on God than almost anyone that might have been in attendance at that meeting. But then again, it brought home the lesson that you can’t judge people because you do not know what they have endured in life or the strength that they possess.

The second talk was given by a French member of the church who spoke quickly and was wonderful to listen to. The third talk was given by an American working for the US Embassy who spoke beautiful French. We talked with him after the meeting and he is living there with his young family (3 very cute and active little boys). He grew up all around the world and learned French early in his life. He reminded me of my brother Doug, both in appearance and his ability to speak French (that is a compliment Doug!). We had a good time talking with a few of the members after church – they were from all over the world. There were a lot of black Africans probably from many different French-speaking countries, Americans, Dutch, Peruvian, etc. We also found out that visitors outnumbered members that day. A lot of the members are away on their vacations and it is certainly the high tourist season now.

After church we found our way down to the Tuileries Garden for… the finish of the Tour de France. We found a place along the inside wall of the Tuilieries where we perched on the wall for about 2 ½ hours waiting for the Tour to come by. The wait was not too awful because we found some candy to buy, we had water, we took turns sitting and met a very nice family from Sasketchuwan, Canada (no idea how to spell that – sorry my Canadian friends!). They knew a lot about the tour and took great pictures that they shared with us. We decided in the end that the long wait was worth the experience of watching the best riders in the world pass by us 8 times as they finished the most difficult bike race in the world. It was amazing at how quickly they rode by. It was also amazing to me that the group of riders looks much smaller in person than they do on TV. They probably zipped by us at 30 miles an hour. There were lots of cars – team cars, press cars, police cars, camera cars, etc. that would fly by before the riders, and then came the riders at an equal speed. The first time around they were closely bunched, and then after that there was a front break away pack of about 7 or 8 riders followed by the peleton (is it still a peleton at that point?). We were able to spot Contador (in the yellow jersey) and Lance Armstrong. It was really quite exciting and probably an experience that we will never repeat. We made our way home on the Metro after the finish and pretty much collapsed on our beds.

Another beautiful day in Paris!

How's the weather?

The weather has been GREAT! It has been slightly overcast with only a few occasional raindrops. This helps keep the temperature down which is wonderful for us. It has been in the mid-70's the whole time we have been here. There are fans in the apartment which will be a real plus if the temp does get any warmer, but opening the windows lets in a lot of fresh air. It also lets in a lot of street noise which is always on "high volume" but shutting the windows shuts out most of the city life. We are very happy, cool and content. Time to go buy some more pain au chocolat.

Au revoir,

Terri

Versailles with Bikes and Jet Lag

Part of the king's bedroom inside the chateau of Versailles.

Heather and Terri on their bikes.

Picnic by the grand canal with our lovely "rain bags."

The girls in front of Versailles. Our apartment doesn't quite look like this, but we are still happy here!

The historic Hall of Mirrors inside the chateau. (Steve has more pictures on his camera. We'll try to download those tonight).

I have been thoroughly chastised by Morgan for making my last entry soooo long. I think we have different impressions of who may actually be reading this blog. I am under the impression that the two or three interested family members may skim through some of the info just to assure that we are alive and well. I also view it as a way to journal our experiences in some detail so that we can look back at it some time and relive some of our experiences again. Because my girls are so much better connected on Facebook, some of their friends may actually be checking the blog out from time to time as well. For the benefit of those who do not like my long –winded explanations for my future self, I will do a bullet point list of the things that we actually did, and then you can skip down (or up) to the pictures. I must motivate someone else in my family to do the actual downloading and posting of the pictures because if any of you know me and my photographic ability, you know you will not see the pictures unless they are done by someone else!

Friday , July 23 – it was a perfect day for a trip to Versailles. This is one of the few activities I had planned out and reserved before we left the United States. We did a bike tour of Versailles with Fat Tire Bike Tour. So here are the bullet points:

· Left the apartment at 8 AM for a 9 AM arrival to the other side of Paris. This included our first Metro ride (went without a hitch) and trying to find a side street not listed on any of the maps I have. We did it with 5 minutes to spare. Always a great sense of accomplishment in navigating a new (and foreign) city.

· Meet the bike tour office and realize that this will be a totally American day. Everyone working in the office was somewhere between the ages of 18 and 30 and all appeared to be American college students working for the summer in Paris. There were no attempts to even try anything in French and everything was done in English in a very American manner – we were already having fun because as loud (and sometimes obnoxious) as Americans can be, we know how to have fun and get things done.

· Ride bikes to the RER train station (through the BUSY streets of Paris) with a group of 20 riders who were not quite up to Tour de France peleton riding. Manhandle bikes up, over and onto a train.

· Ride train to Versailles and once again made our way as a mediocre peleton through the streets of Versailles to the town market.

· The town market was AWESOME and we shopped for food to make a picnic lunch. We bought beautiful baguettes and some quiche, cherries (almost as good as Washington fruit), a hunk of Comte cheese, 2 bottles of fresh apple juice, 2 lovely meringues and even some mousse de canard (duck mousse). There was a crepe stand near the bike staging area of the market and everyone got their first crepe as well. We have been delighted to find that Nutella is a staple at every creperie and you can mix it with many other yummy ingredients – like bananas and whipped cream in this instance.

· Ride bikes on the public grounds of Versailles. We circled the outside of the grounds viewing the Domaine de Marie Antoinette from the outside as well as the Petite and Grande Trianaon. Our guide proved proficient at not only handling amateurs on bikes but gave short but informative information about the chateau, the grounds and the town of Versailles.

· The weather began to look very threatening and we even heard a lot of thunder. Most of our group broke out the cheap plastic rain ponchos we had purchased for a Euro and put them on to keep off the few raindrops that were falling and keep us a bit warmer from the wind.

· We rode around the Grand Canal and got to sit under some of the perfectly groomed (and large) trees that line the canal. We ate our picnic lunch without getting at all wet. Heather had an experience with a swan who thought after being offered a bit of bread would just grab it out of her hand along with her thumb the next time. Kara watched the whole encounter and thought it was very funny. There is more to come on Heather and her bird experiences. We have decided she has a special affinity for the birds of our vacation areas – just ask her about the close encounter she had in Africa.

· The lunch was YUMMY and then we rode to the entrance of the chateau and left the bikes with Andrew (our guide) while we spent about 1 ½ hours inside the palace.

· I have been to Versailles 3 or 4 times, but realized that I had never been there during the summer with all the other tourists. I very much recommend the off season! The palace was very crowded. Normally that is not too much of an issue but at this point Heather was feeling very badly. As a side note, our original travel plans included a couple of nights in our apartment before our bike adventure as well as a day to unpack, relax, sleep some more, etc. As it turned out because of delays, we spent 2 nights on a plane, got here on Thursday afternoon and had to show up for the bike tour the next morning. Heather did not sleep at all on Thursday night – her body was not willing to make the change in time regardless of how tired she was. We entered the chateau about 3 in the afternoon and Heather was really fading at this point, then with the heat and crowds in the building, she was feeling very badly. She managed to make it through and even ooh and aah at the kings and queens apartments, the hall of mirrors and the beauty of the gardens outside but she didn’t enjoy it too much.

· The palace is impressive even with no sleep, a chic plastic rain coat and jet lag. More pictures to come (sometime anyway!).

· We rode the bikes back to the train station and once again, rode, carried and pushed the bikes onto the train. There was a bit of panic at this point because we (as a family) had gotten separated within the group and my attention was focused on making sure Heather at least stayed upright on the bike. Morgan, Steve, Heather and I ended up being together but we didn’t know where Kara was. We asked Andrew, our guide, where she was assuming he had organized her into one of the small groups necessarily spread throughout the train. He said that he had not seen her. Thus began a frantic search up and down the train by Andrew, Steve and I. Everyone thought (including Andrew) that the very first train car had been checked. So Steve and I started checking all the other cars without a sign of her. Panic was now starting to set in and Andrew was trying to get everyone off the train at this point when I ran up to the first car in desperation and of course there she was chatting with other group members having done what she had been told. Mad dash down the length of the train getting al the bikes back on before the train pulled out. That was another huge “whew!!!”

· We all made it back to Paris, more riding through the Paris streets and back to the starting point.

· It was a very fun day and we got to see a lot of Versailles that I had never seen. The guides were fun and we even had to buy a t-shirt of two of “Fat Tire Bike Paris.” Et voila.

· We managed to make it home and eat a few tuna fish sandwhiches before bed (we’ll be here for a month – not every night can be boeuf bourguignon!). The girls finally fell into bed but were afraid of not sleeping so being the caring parents we are, we gave each of them a half sleeping pill to try and help them make the shift to our new time reality.

· Onto another day…

I have totally failed even at the bullet points. My apologies, but just know that I am getting my journal done while you are slogging through the details! (Morgan is continuing to chastise me as we speak, Kara says she is just tired!)