Les vacances

Two days in Paris: we hit some major sites--Notre Dame, musée d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower. We ate well--a Chinese restaurant literally next door to our hotel, and a tasty Moroccan bistro around the corner.

Dad headed home for business, and Mom and I took the Eurostar to London, then got a train up to Scarborough. Was good to be back, we wandered around town a lot, ate in A tearoom (not THE tearoom, because omg it was closed for the weekend--I could have cried). We hiked up the Cleveland Way (check out the undercut cliffs there...no messin around on this path). We caught up with Johan and James, too...got coffee, reminisced about the good ole days of Scarborough mayhem.

We headed back to Paris, crashed in the Comfort Hotel (not exactly deserving of its name), and then I saw Mom off in the morning. Then high-tailed it into town to meet up with Alan for a day of extraordinary museuming. We hit the Picasso museum, Victor Hugo's house, Balzac's house, and (the star of the day) the Marmottan museum, which pretty much left me speechless with its collection of Monets. Just. Stunning.

We night-trained to Carcassonne, arriving at about 6am. There ARE places opening up at this hour, fortunately, so we splurged on a brasserie breakfast of OJ, tea, croissants, and bread. Then hiked to our nice but distant hotel, CRASHED, and then got back up to visit la cité. Carcassonne has two parts: the new part (nice, but standard as far as little French towns go), and the old part, which is a medieval walled city. Over our three days there, we walked the walls, took a tour of the chateau, and also roamed through the new part of town. Walked along the Canal du Midi a bit. Ate cassoulet--regional speciality consisting of beans, sausage, and chicken all baked together. Saw a movie--La Môme--about the life of Edith Piaf. We took the midnight train out of Carcassonne (in fiiiirst class couchettes, awesome!) and made it to Orléans around 6:30am. Waited two hours for the train to Blois, then made a killer breakfast of eggs and croissants and muesli before meandering home to settle back down to daily life. I'm still doing laundry and it's 5pm. And if the washing machine hadn't been taking all the hot water, I'd definitely have showered by now. Off to sort that out...