Life in House Highmen the last year has been rough.
Yeah, yeah, whine, whine whine.
So we were poking around on kayak, looking for deals to do something crazy, like to go France. I like France. It's a lot like the USA with better food and garbled lingo.
With flights to Paris from Vancouver more than $300 cheaper than comparable flights from Seattle, launching from YVR was the obvious choice. Hotels in the YVR airport area have good nightly rates as well as special deals for leaving ones car there. For us, the hotel gave us a week of free parking, then charged $5 cdn per day thereafter.
The Westjet flight left YVR at 9:40 and landed in Toronto where we had a couple hour layover before boarding the Air France flight to Charles De Gaulle. With the plane change, we had all decided to do carry on.
Things were a little chaotic in Toronto, but AF was gracious enough to allow parents with kids to get on before the rest of economy class. Seating was tight, but better than most US airlines and the food was killer good. I dozed, trying to get ready for wending our way though Paris to the hotel in the Latin Quarter.
On landing, we knew that the goal was to find the B train from CDG to Place Saint Michel at the W. end of the Ile de La Cite and 5 blocks to the Hotel Central Saint Germain where we had a week booked.
We landed at 9:30 am and managed to reel around in CDG and find the automated train ticket machines where we got 4 passes for the B train.
The B train was easy to find and the ride into Paris was that kind of scritchy all night ethereal roll. We past miles of trashy suburbs plastered with awesome tagging.
Placed Saint Michel was an overload of zooming Parisians on all modes of transport. Dense in the stream were legions of helmetless scooter riders expressing death wishes by weaving in and out of traffic.
It was a short walk up to the Hotel, largely disjoint from any sense of reality as we soaked in post transatlantic sleepless drear, piecing together some semblance of coherency from a map and a bent slice of our surroundings.
Hotel Central Saint Germain was accomodating to let us take our top floor room early. It looked out over narrow Rue Champollions little cinema alley with slices of lives of Paris visible across the way drying its underwear among the pigeons, chimneys and antennae.
My modius operandi in these situations is to try to power through that first day and get diurnally adjusted as quickly as possible. So after minor adjustments, the entire clan wobbled off to the Ile de La Cite.
Paris was crawling with pods of 3-5 French army guys, each packing evil eyes and a submachine gun . They weren't messing around. Notre Dame was mobbed, so we just cruised past and went over to try to get into the Petite Chapelle. Unfortunately, we were a few minutes too late to get in, so we kept heading North to the bank of the Seine. We flowed along the road past the Hotel Dieu and down a sidestreet to find a little bistro, La Reserve de Quasimodo. We stopped for a late lunch. The Seine was still flooding, but had receded enough to walk down some of the stairs.
Not so fresh off the flight, La Reserve de Quasimodo:
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Petite Chapelle
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Flooding Seine:
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After that we looped up to the bridge to Ile Saint Louis, then back across the Seine just East of Notre Dame zone and carved back through the little angly streets of the Latin Quarter to the hotel where the rest of my posse collapsed. I left them snoozing while I found more coffee, a bit more bitter than I had hoped, but close by. It was the first of several coffee bars I prowled.
I had contacted PhilippeR who was kind enough to meet me at Les Deux Magots for some talk and wine. We talked about skiing in France and someday I've got to get to Val D'Isere.
I struggled to stay awake, walking around Rue St. Germain, Rue des Ecoles and Rue Saint Jacques. Another coffee bar, not so bad, but still not the smooth espresso of my dreams and I went back to roust my troops for dinner. With limited success, I managed to wake my wife up and we went and had a nice little meal at the Bistro Perigourd. I had duck, foie gras and a salad and my wife had a salad. I woke up several times about to plant my face in several of these dishes. Their red wine was good and they even had a glass of Montbazillac to go with the foie gras. By 8:00 I was a a sonambulist and Lisa gently nudged me back towards our room at the hotel.
Someone loves escargot:
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On rising the next day, the target was the Musee d'Orsay. I did a little more reconnaissance and found the local 'Bistro 1' made excellent coffee and there was a killer boulangerie, the Patisserie Viennoise, just next door. I had also had found a gluten free bakery and gotten a loaf of gluten free bread for the gf portion of our troupe, so we breakfasted on the way angling down theough Saint Germain through the gallery district to the Musee d'Orsay.
The d'Orsay was an exercise in being overwhelmed. Still jetlagged, the surreality of being immersed in all that art was a lot for the senses. The Lautrecs were so awesome. The sculpture on the levels rising from the entry blew my daughters mind. She kept asking how they got the marble fabric to look so real. After the array of stuff up through the 4th floor including Monet, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh to name the big ones we repaired to the gallery district for lunch and then a stroll back to the hotel for a nap before dinner. I discovered a new deep appreciation for Sisley and Pissarro.
For dinner we went to the Bistroy Papille. The Prix fix was excellent with the main dish being a lamb leg roasted for 6 hours. The appetizer has an incredible sweet potato soup. Wine was a 2012 Dujac Morey Saint Denis. All the ground floor tables were full, so we ate in the private dining room in the basement which was a little musty. Service was excellent, friendly and lovely. One of the best food experiences and not super fancy, but more earthy and real.
Next day we tore around Notre Dame and saw the Petite Chapelle. ND is somebre, gaping and largely dark with the weight of age and size. PC was by contrast much more accessible and just incredibly beautiful with soaring panes of stained glass as electric as any memory from the 60s. The line to climb the tower was long, so we skipped it until a couple of days later and ended up walking over to the Ile St. Louis for lunch at an ancient bistro where the duck was delicious. Dinner this night was at the Coupechou. It's a beautiful building and the service was excellect, but the food wasn't particularly stellar. It was great, mind you, by any US standards, but wasn't particularly inventiveor noteworthy. Nice duck breast, decent wine list, but expensive.
Notre Dame :
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Next day was the Louvre. Then the Polidor, a bistro open since 1845.
