Started the day meeting up with David and Colleen for coffee, then they were off back to Seattle. I decided to do a field trip and took the RER A out to the Ile des Impressioniste. This was where Renoir did many paintings. It was windy and rainy, I chased my hat across a bridge and 4 lanes of traffic, and amazingly nobody ran it over, so it, a little worse for wear, I got it back. Walked around a little and ended up at the classic Maison Fournaise, with a lovely Lobster Bisque followed by a mushroom risotto. With rainy and very windy weather, I headed to the Bastille and found a nearby place on Rue de Lappe for Pho. Then back to Le Bucheron, my local where I get a warm reception. I bought a nice bottle of Gigondas from a local wine shop and you would have thought it was Christmas. This was shared with the owner and his mother and two other friends. All in all a fine low key evening.

Today I did a grand tour for Colleen and David who only had one day to see the sights. Here’s what we did: Coffee at Back in Black, walk to Marche d‘Aligre, Metro to Trocadero for Eiffel Tower pictures, then metro to Champs Elysees then Gallery Lafayette, roof top and tour of store, walk past Opera Garnier. Lunch at Le Grand Colbert. Walk to Louvre, pictures with pyramid. Back for nap. Then bus to St. Sulpice, church, then walk through Luxembourg gardens, then tapas at L’Avant Comptoir du Mer, Wine at les Editeurs and then charcuterie at Deux Magots. All in all a pretty full day for a one day Paris tour! 16,600 steps!

Low key day to day. Walk through of the Bastille market, then off to Marche d’Aligre, coffee at Early Bird. Lunch at Vietnamese place that was good. Then regroup and off to Distillerie du Viaduc for an Earful Tower event, followed by meeting Seattle friends David and Colleen for dinner.

After running around like crazy yesterday, I needed a little bit slower day today, but it still ended up being quite busy. Woke up early and went over to the storage space, that Linda, our secretary, has rented for the Fractional. It is about a10 minute walk around the corner. Noticed that the Synagogue about 2 buildings up from us was guarded by 4 serious looking soldiers with Automatic rifles. Later in the day the road would be blocked to cars. Multiple Airports in France got bomb threats today so they were closed. After making sure I could get into our storage unit and storing my walking poles, grabbed a bus over to the Orsay where there is an interesting Van Gogh exhibit. With my membership card, I skipped the line and was right in at 9:15am. Unfortunately they apparently let some guides and tour groups in so there were multiple clusters of people with talky guides, oh well. Great collection of paintings. After a quick run through of that, back on the bus to the Rodin museum for a walk through the garden. They had some truly disturbing exhibit of bodies suspended from the ceiling. Still not sure what that was about. After that walked over to Rue Cler to see if I’d bump in to Rick Steves. Then another bus ride to Montparnasse, where the Relais de L’entercote actually didn’t have a line. This restaurant only does one steak and fries and a salad and that’s it. It was good and they bring you seconds whether you ask for them or not! After that back home to regroup and then to Le Hibou by Odeon to meet up with some people. LM from HNL came by to say hi, and some of us ended up next door at Breizh for a pastrami Galette. Raining all afternoon, but fairly warm.

I booked a train round trip to Reims last night before going to sleep and it went pretty well. By booking the direct train, it was about 47 minutes each direction from Gare de L‘Est. Reims was much bigger than I expected and seemed like a very nice town. There is a good main drag of restaurants, then a great cathedral, and a large covered market. Unfortunately, Tuesday is not a market day. After some exploration I ended up with an excellent lunch menu of vegetable potage and fish with risotto. Tried a little champagne with it. Then I had heard that Pommery had great tunnels, so took a 20 minute bus ride out to the caves. Mainly full of modern art, not really much discussion about the champagne making process, and offered a glass of champagne with the admission, but no real tasting process. Other Champagne houses all over the town, unfortunately often closed or by appointment. Really didn’t find much champagne on offer other than at local cafes and at places selling stuff. They were largely closed during the time frame I had to deal with. Never the less a nice town and I would gladly go back for another visit.

Got out the door early and using my Carte Blanche membership was able to walk into the Orangerie right at 9:00am. Visiting Modigliani exhibit to terribly interesting as it was focused on his patron. Water Lillys always nice. Walked around the Madeline etc. and ended up at Le Grand Colbert for lunch. Hadn’t been there before but it was in a Jack Nicholson movie. Excellent lunch of Skate wing. Then off to try to go to the top of Arc de Triomphe. Had bought online ticket around 10:30am and when I got there after lunch they were closed because they were on strike. Email did produce a response that suggested if I couldn’t go at a later date I could file all kinds of paperwork for a refund. Then, they said that the ticket was only good for the date issued and could not be changed…. We will see. Wonderful dinner with friends CC and his friend R. I stopped and got some interesting cheeses from my neighborhood Frommager and then we went to an Italian place in the 6th and just had a lovely octopus salad.

Started today by meeting up with some other Earful Tower podcast listeners at the base of the Coulee Verte. We had Oliver himself come and give a tour for 7 of us. Good fun, a walk along the Coulee for awhile, then off to the Marche d’Aligre, one of my favorite markets in Paris. We tasted a few cheeses, some wine etc. and then headed to Baron Rouge for some oysters. After that walked over to the Bastille Sunday market, but unfortunately my usual crepe place had way too many people in line to be worth the wait. After a few spring rolls at a local Traiteur, back to the apartment for awhile, then off to Deux Magots for tea. Headed over to Pl. Collette by the Louvre for some tango, but the surface was pretty rough and it really didn’t come together. Temperatures are dropping fast with lows anticipated at close to 40 degrees tonight, what a change from a few days ago. The whole city is nuts on Rugby World Cup and various metro stops related to this are closed. Every bar and restaurant has TVs set up with noisy people cheering. Ended up having a burger at Le Compas before heading back to the apt for an early night. Struggling to turn on the heat in the apartment, always a challenge as the 3 radiant heaters all have various cryptic symbols and no one has figured out how to really program them. If you are extremely lucky, you can get it to some kind of manual mode, but even finding that is not easy. Owners manual is useless and maintenance guy I had come over last trip was hopeless. Not sure why European appliances love non sensical symbols and making thing complicated. I just want to set a temperature and have it stay there, does that seem like an unreasonable ask?

Headed out to the gallery Lafayette this morning with the hopes of buying a blazer, but everything was way too pricey. Did some good exploration found an excellent Poulet Fermier for lunch and then headed over to the British embassy for a wedding celebration party for Darren and Sharon. They got married out on the North Shore and stayed at the beach house in February. Good fun, much cooler today. Louvre was closed because of some sort of unspecified threat. Closed the metro stop and snarled traffic.

Headed off to NoGlu this morning for a GF croissant, not very convenient but sometimes that’s just what’s needed. From there a very long metro ride to the Albert Kahn museum and gardens on that outskirts of Paris. Kahn decided to make photos of everything he could shortly after WW1. So the collection has something like 72,000 photos a real treasure trove of history. In addition there was a temporary exhibit featuring Buenos Aires, amazing how a lot has not changed. Also great gardens, including a good Japanese garden. After some exploring I got back on the metro and headed to Rue Mouffetard to have some lunch. My salad had more charcuterie than salad, but no complaints. Then after doing some laundry and hanging at the apartment off to meet Lin and Camilo for dinner. Today was a non sensical general strike, but mostly transit was not affected.

Today started early with a bus ride to the train station in Caen, then an easy nonstop 2 hour train ride to Gare St. Lazare. From there a couple of metro rides and got to the apartment before noon. The cleaning people were just finishing, and I got things arranged how I like them and did a grocery run and some laundry. It was pretty warm and muggy in Paris and threatened rain but didn’t actually rain. Headed over to La Terrasse du 7-eme for a meet up with Vero and the gang from a facebook group. Many I’ve met before and it evolved into a simple steak frites dinner. Not too many photos today.