Emily and Linda’s Travel Blog

Saturday Linda left first to visit an Urban Photography exhibit - "Street Sans Frontières" which I'll let her tell about. Then we met up at the Centre Pompidou. I had an adventure taking the bus with the other gray heads. My route from the bus stop took me down this street - take a a right at the mural and there was the Beaubourg plaza, Stravinsky fountain, and Centre Pompidou with all its innards on the outside. 

As you go up the outside escalators, the view changes until you're at Paris roof level and then above. 

The views of Sacré Coeur and Nôtre Dame were remarkable- you can see that Nôtre Dame has covered the roof. 

We wandered some of the galleries, but the building is a lot of the fun.  Here are a few of the pieces I spent time with and the sculpture garden on the 5th floor.  The first painting is a Kandinsky  the second is by a Russian woman named Natalia Gontcharova whom I'd never encountered before.  I'm ashamed to say I forgot to note the sculptor's names  

Of course, Linda spent a lot of time playing with the light and distortions of the building

Friday evening we headed over to the Marais for dinner. The bar/resto was cute, but the food was unremarkable. So we passed on dessert there and instead picked up some intensely chocolate gelato which was the perfect thing to eat while enjoying the Place des Vosges as the sun set. 

We set off Friday AM with the plan to walk around the 7th Arrondissement and end up at a gluten free bakery (there are quite a few in Paris - GF has definitely arrived here). 

First a stop at the local Feminist book store 2 blocks from our flat and some window browsing

Then on to our first Metro ride. More bad French and a kind ticket agent who saved me from buying the wrong transit passes and we were off

Arrived right by the Tour Eiffel where a charity walk/run was ending up

Sadly, I had miscalculated the distance so what was intended as a pleasant walk turned into more of a slog, but we fortified ourselves with a bit of lunch at a sidewalk cafe (Linda had a Croques Monsieur - the fancier French cousin of a grilled ham. and cheese sandwich)

We did finally make it to No Glu which had, as promised, fabulous pastries and bread- I had Madeleines for the first time in years (and of course thought of Proust)

After all that walking, I was glad to find frozen peas at the store across the street for a quick ice pack alternative 

We have arrived and successfully negotiated getting into our Airbnb flat. A few snags, but now on track. Too sleepy to do much beside post a few lines and pics. Cute neighborhood (apparently trending ). Lots of interesting shops and cafes.

Moody skies over Mansard roofs

We will definitely not go hungry. There's a bakery good enough to have a line (it was out the door at one point), a Charcouterie, an Asian delicacies shop, and tonight's pick - a sweet little Lebanese restaurant where they were very kind about my bad French. 

Hope to see my college friend John tomorrow at his house in the countryside beyond the City. 

Bedtime now. 

The leg room was pretty great

But communication poor and sadly my leg rest didn’t work. 

Definitely better than coach, but not quite the experience that was promised  

The trip home took quite a while - whether the final destination was the Bronx (snowy drive), Greenport (car and ferry), or Brooklyn (snowy drive, Metro North, taxi). Average time about 6.5 hours. However, Linda, Max, and I broke it up by stopping at Saratoga Springs for lunch. No time to "take the waters" at the springs (on another trip perhaps), but we did check out Comfort Kitchen where the decor was clever and the very tasty food was a bit more photogenic. Finding it was not so easy - it’s inside an unpromising looking mall on Broadway. Definitely worth persistence. 

We visited Lake Champlain which turned out to be minutes from our farmhouse accommodation. Beautiful day, though chilly. 

Later we went to Jessica's at the Swift House for dinner in celebration of our retirement and Chris' and Linda's birthdays. Lovely old colonial inn

The plates photos didn’t come out as all that interesting, but the food and wine was excellent 

Here’s the picture that was chosen for inclusion in the Color Moment show.  It’s called "The Dangling Conversation"

Today we lounged a while over coffee and breakfast in our farm house and then headed over to Middlebury to see Linda's  photo in the show: A Color Moment.  We arrived at about 11:30 only to find the gallery closed even though the posted hours were 11-4:00 😮😩 .  All that travel for nothing!  But happily it’s a small and trusting town and the fellow next door was able to let us in so allwas well in the end.  

I'll post the actual photo file later, but here’s the artist and her work.

Melissa's niece, Anna is at Middlebury College so she was able to pop over to meet us and lead us to a tasty lunch at the Middlebury Co-op.  

She  was also kind enough to take a group shot after lunch before scurrying back to class