Paris – Day 7

Saturday morning (about 6 months ago now!), we got up really early to head to the train station, Gare St. Lazare, to catch the 8:20am train to Vernon.  We enjoyed cheese and snacks for breakfast on the train ride as well as a nice view of the French countryside (or at least as much as you can get from the train).  Once we arrived in Vernon, we hopped on a shuttle bus to Giverny to visit Monet’s house.

Giverny was amazing, a quaint picturesque village dotted with flowers, gardens, and houses that seem to cute for people to actually live in.

At Monet’s house we took a tour of the interior (no pictures allowed, and I even got glared at when I pretended to sneak a shot!), the gardens, and the water lily pond that inspired his Nympheas (which we saw two days earlier).

We spent a couple hours walking around the village, seeing the church where Monet was buried, strolling down the streets, and visiting the town’s impressionist museum.

We headed back to Vernon to catch our train and had a couple hours to kill, so we walked around the city, shopped at a street fair, found a cool painting we bought at a little antique shop, and tried some pastries we hadn’t seen in the Parisian shops.  We enjoyed seeing a more typical small French city and definitely enjoyed the lower prices away from tourists.

The train was incredibly crowded for the ride back to Paris, so we had to sit separately.  I (Kirk) sat next to a posh middle-aged French woman, and we had a great conversation and she recommended some good places for us to visit.  When we got back to Paris we went straight to the Arc de Triomphe.

I thought Lynne would enjoy walking the Champs-Elysees to see the shops and people watch, but neither of us enjoyed how crowded, dirty, loud, and overpriced it was.  We couldn’t find anyplace we wanted to eat, so we headed home.

We found a Thai restaurant near our house and figured it was worth shot to see how Parisians did Thai food.  It was a bad decision.  While we had amazing Vietnamese food earlier in the week, the Thai was quite inauthentic, bland, and over-priced.   Maybe if we had never had real Thai food, we wouldn’t have noticed, since it wasn’t like it was inedible, but it definitely left us wanting.  We walked home, still hungry, and enjoyed wine and cheese, cookies, and chocolate Madeleines.