vacation

Paris Part 2: Tour Eiffel and (almost) scarring my kids for life

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Monday morning felt like the first real day. We woke up more or less fresh, ready to face the day. On Sunday, pretty much everything in the neighborhood was closed. The place was dead. On Monday things started to liven up a bit (although only about half way… apparently it is a French tradition and about half the places are closed on Mondays as well). In particular we were able to hit up the boulangerie / pâtisserie that was two doors down from our house.

A boulangerie is a bakery, and a pâtisserie is a pastry shop. Most places, including this one, are both. These things are all over the place in France, and I would say maybe they are the best part about Paris. The pastries, tarts, deserts, etc. are absolutely amazing, and taste as good as they look. They’re not that expensive either!

And the bread…oh man, do they have good bread.  How good can bread be? Well, ask Evie, who pretty much ate nothing but bread from this point forward. In fact, Evie couldn’t even wait until we got home with the baguette, and nibbled the end off before we got there. I don’t blame her, it is addicting!

Actually, nibbling the end off your baguette is sort of another French tradition, and you can see people all over the city carrying baguettes with little nibbled off ends. It’s kind of funny, because it is such a stereotype to have a baguette in France, but you really do see people all over everywhere carrying them.

Part 2A, Tour Eiffel

Anyway, the first stop in the morning was the Tour Eiffel (or Eiffel Tower for you English types). Here’s Paris travel tip number 2: a timed ticket for the Eiffel Tower is a must! You buy it online, ahead of time. We had some trouble with the trains in the morning and ended up puffing up to the base of the tower just as our time was coming up (and we had specifically gotten a later time!). No problem! We strolled past the long line and right up to the ticket taker.

There’s not much to say about the Eiffel Tower. You know what it looks like, and taking the elevator up is pretty much like going up any touristy destination, such as the Sears Tower, or the Empire State Building. You have a nice view of Paris, but Paris is a city designed to have nice views: pretty much every major attraction involves climbing a bunch of stairs to the top for a good view. That being said, Paris is truly a beautiful city, and you never really have too many views of it.

So going up the tower was really cool, and a must do for any tourist to Paris, but at the same time there wasn’t much to say. We only went up to the 2nd level, not to the very top (the top requires an extra ticket and an extra wait in an extra long line), and I think that was fine. I’m not big on heights anyway.

The other thing to say about the experience is that the base is crawling with people trying to sell you souvenir Eiffel Towers. I cannot imagine how there can be so many of them! They are all selling the same junk for the same price, and nobody is buying from them because they are so annoying. I don’t know how they can make any money.

Afterwards we went over to Trocadero for pictures of the Eiffel Tower. This is Paris tip #3. When you’re at the base of the tower, you’re too close for good pictures. Walk across the Seine and up a bunch of stairs and you’ll have just fabulous views of the tower, for free no less. I think these were some of the best pictures we took on the trip.

Part 2B, Sacré-Coeur / Montmartre

Next we went over to Sacré-Coeur (Sacred Heart), which is a really big, cool church set high on the hill of Montmartre. It ranked up there with some of the cooler churches we saw in Italy. In particular, it was very dimly lit with hundreds upon hundreds of candles lighting it. It was a pretty spectacular effect. (Of course the candles are paid for and lit by tourists, but it still looked good.)

Afterwards we walked around Montmartre, which is an area that always has been and still is dominated by artists. You may have heard of some of the more famous ones who used to hang out here like, oh I don’t know, Dalí, Monet, Picasso or van Gogh to name a few.

This was a really cool part of the city, with old cobble stone streets, an open-air artist’s market, houses previously owned by famous artists (see above), and street musicians. There’s a certain pride to the artistic history of the place, and the street musicians we saw certainly upheld the tradition: they were awesome! We caught some gelato and listened for a while. We debated buying a CD and now I wish we would have.

We also took a break somewhere in here, and Evie and I rode a cool 2 story carousel (the French are apparently really into carousels), and Evie took plenty of time to do some pigeon chasing. There really aren’t that many pigeons in Paris, all things considered, but they do tend to congregate where there are tourists, because there is usually food there. They are quite bold. I don’t think anybody really objected to Evie chasing them around for a while.

Finally Evie fell asleep…on Aymeric’s (my boss) head. He had been giving her a ride on his shoulders and she just conked out, resting her head on the top of his and snoozing away. He said that he felt her sort of nod down a few times and then just smash into his head.

We were walking around Montmartre, looking for famous houses and windmills, when we eventually realized we had accidentally wandered into Pigalle. For those not familiar with Paris, Pigalle is sort of like the red light district. So of course, Evie immediately woke up. I don’t think she managed to see too much. The stores and things are shockingly obscene, but only if you can read the signs. I would say there was less to actually see than I saw on the streets of New Orleans. Still, it was the middle of the day, and I’m sure nights are a little more…rowdy. We also crossed the street and realized we were standing in front of the famous Moulin Rouge; a fortunate accident.

After this we went to Aymeric’s cousin’s house to use the computer and find out that we had not, in fact, paid the security deposit. I dashed off a quick email apologizing to the land lord (Did I say quick email? Did you know that the French keyboard is subtly different than the American one? It took me like 15 minutes to type a 3 line email).

Part 2C, Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:

Even in France, Oliver gets lots of pointing, smiles and goofy faces made at him. When we were riding the metro, he kept grabbing a lady’s paper out of her hands. She loved it. Evie, on the other hand, gets lots of “what’s wrong with that girl, is she sleeping?” faces. Every afternoon she would just pass out, boneless. You would think kids in Paris never sleep, the way some of the people were looking at her. Like, “Does she have some kind of condition?” She was pretty out of it though.

Just in general, you notice a lot of differences between the way Europeans live and the way we live at home. Kids are living in the lap of luxury in Paris. Every kid is dressed up in super fancy, expensive duds, sitting in an expensive stroller. We kind of got the impression that kids are a big status symbol, at least among the people with money. So maybe we were being judged more on the quality of our little umbrella stroller that didn’t allow Evie to recline, more than the fact that she was sleeping.

Maybe the kids are just dressed like the parents are dressed. Paris tip #4: don’t come wearing your Abercrombie sweatshirt and your grubby jeans and expect to fit in. These people know how to dress. I think that they tend to buy less clothes, but more expensive items. Even teenagers are awesome at putting together an outfit, and putting on makeup. And everybody is thin! There really were times when I thought I was walking into model-land. Tourists were easiest to pick out by their dress than anything else. So I guess it’s no surprise that every kid was dressed to the nines.

Also, everything in Paris was smaller. Tiny cars, tiny apartments, smaller portions. The apartment we rented was significantly bigger than the one Aymeric’s cousin lived in, and believe me, it wasn’t big. And you know what? It was the perfect size for what we needed. It was really just sort of refreshing to see people living like that, and not just sort of urban-sprawling all over the place.

Although I still don’t understand why the toilet and the rest of the bathroom are always in separate rooms…

Paris Part 1 – Off to see the wizard

/ Shane / 2 Comments

The trip started off very stressful.

I had been working long hours for a couple of weeks leading up to the trip to get ready on the work side. The last two days were particularly bad, with nothing going well and working late into the night, and then too keyed up to sleep very well after that. Finally, on Friday night I said, “I need to start packing!” On top of that, the maids were scheduled to come while we were gone, so we needed to pick up the entire house before we left.

So I was a bit frazzled going into the whole thing. In addition, there was some question about how to actually get to the airport. Taking anything besides public transportation meant that we would need car seats. Also, we weren’t sure if we could arrange to not need any car seats on the airplane, or on the France side of things. However, we didn’t want to be lugging them all over Paris all week.

So we decided to park in a lot close to the airport and take a shuttle (I’ve never parked in a lot operated by someone other than the airport). As a compromise, we borrowed a CARES airplane harness from someone, and took one car seat that either Evie or Oliver could use. If, by some miracle, the plane was empty and Oliver could get a seat, we would put him in the car seat and use the harness for Evie. Otherwise, Evie would ride in the car seat, because we thought she’d be more comfortable (the CARES is very small, so it wasn’t a big deal to bring it and not use it).

As it turns out, the car lot was fine and Evie used the car seat in both directions. Literally as we were going out the door, I found the strap to hook the car seat behind one of the suitcases, for easy carrying. It was still a pain dragging it to and from our apartment in Paris (particularly in Charles de Gaulle airport, which is NOT set up to move wide things around)(kind of like the rest of Europe), but it wasn’t that bad.

Part 1A, Travel:

So we actually go to the airport early, and everything was fine. Not too shabby!

The flight went pretty well. Evie only wanted to eat pretzels the whole time. This sort of began her love affair with grains that would last the entire trip. The flight was direct and overnight, so Evie slept for about 3 hours and Oliver for about 3 1/2 (Sara and I got about 1 1/2 and 1 hour, respectively).

We had reserved a bassinet for the flight, which we had heard you could do, but never actually seen before. From what we could tell online, it would bolt to the bulkhead in front of you. So we were a little surprised when we got to our seats and they were just regular seats in the middle of the airplane, with no room to attach anything. We paged a stewardess over and told her that we had reserved a bassinet, expecting her to either say, “Whoops, you shouldn’t be in these seats!” or “Well, you can’t have one in these seats.” Instead she said, “Oh yes, they’re very cute, I’ll bring it out once we are in the air.”

Okay, you’ve flown before. I barely have enough room for my feet. Where the heck were they planning on putting a bassinet?? We later heard that there is something that actually slides under the seat in front of you, like a drawer. Aside from the fact that the person would have to have no legs, and that we had enough bags to take up the room under all of the seats, I am not going to close my baby in a little coffin and shove it under a seat! No thank you! So, needless to say, we didn’t hold the stewardess to her word, and we never saw the bassinet. I’m kind of wishing we had, just to see the thing.

The big trouble was trying to keep Evie from kicking the seat in front of her. At one point, when Sara was admonishing Evie for kicking, the lady turned around and said, “Thank you for trying.” When we got up to leave, the lady said that Evie had been very good, even if she was a little “kicky”. Oliver got a little fussy at times, but we mostly just had to stand up with him and he was okay.

Changing Oliver’s diaper was also very interesting. Sara managed to change him in the airplane bathroom, with no changing table. I don’t know if you’ve been in an airplane bathroom, but there is barely enough room for me, and certainly no room for a flat surface of any kind. I’m not sure how she managed it.

Especially when Oliver had an explosive one later in the flight. It was getting close to landing time, and everyone had been told go get in their seats. Sara asked the stewardess if she could get up to change the diaper. Her answer was something like, “I can’t give you permission, but…you have to decide that on your own.” In other words, get to!

Part 1B, Paris at Last:

Finally, we were on the ground in France!

The first thing we had to do was get the keys to our apartment. We decided to rent an apartment in Paris for the week, rather than staying at a hotel. There were lots of upsides: it was cheaper, we’d be in a real neighborhood with real French people, shops, etc., and we could do laundry and thus avoid bringing as much luggage with us. However, there were downsides too. We’d read about unscrupulous renters online, who nickel and dime you with hidden fees, and try to keep as much of your security deposit as they could. So we were a little nervous.

Right off the bat, things started bad. First off they told us we’d have to pay for electricity, which hadn’t been mentioned anywhere before. Then, they said we hadn’t paid the (substantial) security deposit, which we were sure we had paid. I had to run out and find a bank to get as much cash as I could (not sure how much we got charged for that), plus give up most of our cash on hand. This made us VERY nervous! (Not to spoil it, but it ended up that they were right and we hadn’t paid the security deposit, so we can’t hold that against them. However, we didn’t know this for a few more days).

Anyway, no matter how nervous we were, we walked away with the keys and a place to put our stuff, and then we hit the town for lunch. We found a little farmers market and bought a bunch of dried fruit and a few tarts. We had no idea what one of them was, but it looked good, and turned out to be pumpkin!

We spent the rest of the day more or less just walking around trying to avoid going to bed. Conventional wisdom says to try and stay up as long as possible, to avoid jet lag. For Evie and Oliver, as long as possible wasn’t that long, and they crashed hard. We weren’t doing a lot better, considering how little sleep we had had on the plane, to say nothing of the nights leading up to the trip.

We had promised Evie we would see a marionette show, but she fell asleep before we got there, and we couldn’t wake her up for anything. She was completely dead to the world. We tried and tried, and even came back for the next show, but she was out. Predictably, she was pretty disappointed later, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.

Finally we did some grocery shopping, to stock up in the apartment. Here is where I have my first tip for travel in France: how to buy wine.

Basically, we wanted to load up on wine, but we had no idea what to buy. The French take wine VERY seriously, but it is also pretty cheap. However, they don’t have the same varieties, etc. that we have here in the states, and of course everything is in French.

So here’s what you do: loiter about the wine isle as if you are really looking hard, trying to decide. Wait until a Frenchman comes in, watch what he buys, and then grab it the second he walks away. Rinse, repeat. This works especially good if the person appears to be a discerning consumer. One guy picked up several bottles and really studied them, before deciding on a particular one. We felt pretty good about buying that one!

This worked great, as all the wine was fantastic. I suppose you could use this trick anywhere you had to buy wine, not just France. But we were very happy with the ones that we ended up with. And guess what? They were under 5 Euro each!

Back from Paris

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Hello all,

We just got back from Paris. Please bear with me while I get some things in order. Details will be coming forthwith.

-The Management

(Not our picture)

Dear Maids

/ Shane / 5 Comments

If you are going to come while we are on vacation (so that we have to stress about picking up our house while we are trying to get ready to go) and won’t be home for a week, then please make sure with ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY that you do not leave the door to the litter box shut. Because that would be bad. Almost like the opposite of cleaning our house.

In other news, does anybody know what about 7 days of cat urine and feces does to a treadmill?

Rounding the Lake Part 3: Up in the U.P.

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Next up was the portion of the trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (or the U.P. as it is commonly referred to). Evie had been talking about “the upper peninsula” for weeks at this point, telling everybody she saw that’s where she was going. So I knew this would really be the exciting part of the trip for her.

One of the first things I did on the trip is stop at a shop and try a pasty. Pasties are a big deal up there. They are sort of like a savory pot pie, but very dry inside, not soupy. I went for the traditional beef with rutabaga, which I really liked a lot. Evie had a pizza one which was really delicious, but it was stuffed with cheese and sausage and pepperoni, so how could it not be good? The downside is the heart attack you have afterwards, but you can’t have everything.

In general, the U.P. gave me some flashbacks to when I was little and we used to own a bit of land outside of Wisconsin Dells. Driving around the country side there had the same sort of foresty, nobody’s-around-but-me feeling. This was a good thing.

The other thing about going up North is how ridiculously friendly everybody is! I know this isn’t news to people, but seriously, it is so over the top you would think you were in an SNL skit or something. I’ll give you an example.

There was a group of guys camping next to us. This was like a “guy’s weekend” type deal, with a bunch of guys on a fishing trip. One morning I was taking a shower while the lot of them were in the bathroom. When you get a bunch of guys together, they inevitably start making fun of each other. It’s just what they do. Usually, this good natured ribbing is anything but good natured. It can get pretty nasty.

Not with these guys though. This was the most good natured ribbing I could ever imagine. It redefined good natured. I could barely keep from bursting out in laughter in the shower.

Guy 1: “Got enough shaving cream there, eh?”
Guy 2: “Yeah, I’m gonna shave my back!”
::uproarious laughter::

Guy 2: “Hey, did you bring your swim suit, eh?”
Guy 1: “Yeah, I brought my speedo!”
::uproarious laughter::

Guy 1: “Oh, was that you in there taking that long shower?”
Guy 3: “Yeah…I’ve been in there since 5 a.m.!”
::uproarious laughter::

Seriously, there was absolutely no malice in these guys. These were also the guys who got visibly upset that someone might have played a prank on someone that went on a little too long. I just wanted to pinch their cheeks.

As for what we we actually did while we were up there, we used our campsite as a base of operations and struck out for sites around the area, such as Oswald’s Bear Ranch, Tahquamenon Falls:

and Kitchitikipi spring:

Tahquamenon Falls was pretty cool, but I really liked Kitchitikipi. A water fall looks like what you would expect: a water fall. But kitchitikipi looked like something I never really imagined before, namely, water 50 feet deep that was so crystal clear that you could pick out the one fish in the entire thing.

Orlan brought his speedboat, so Evie and I went for a ride, and Evie got to drive. She was pretty good at steering (as long as you like going in circles), by which I mean if you said, “Go over there,” she would point the boat in that direction. The problem was that she would usually try to do it at about a 90 degree angle, and I think she almost flipped the boat a few times.

Evie had yet another birthday party. It was a good thing too, because she had been complaining all week about how she hadn’t gotten anything she wanted for her birthday. That was because we knew she was going to be getting everything everything she wanted when we got to the U.P. For the record, everything she ever wanted was a basket for her bike, and a yellow raincoat that, “covered [her] bottom” and matching boots. She’s not too hard to please as of yet.

Lisa and Orlan also got Evie a Moose CD, which entered the rotation with Wicked. Every song on the CD features a “moose” singing in a big goofy voice (I’m not sure Evie understands it’s not really a moose), and usually involves some horrible pun on the word moose (there is a whole block of songs about Christ-moose). Naturally, Evie loved it.

Another highlight was watching Evie fish. Tom had gotten her a fishing pole for her birthday, so we went over to Seney Wildlife Refuge, and Evie caught not one, but TWO fish! I couldn’t believe it. I was all prepared to explain to her about how you don’t always catch a fish and within like 5 minutes, she had a fish on the line! Then she caught the second one shortly after that. Needless to say, she had a really good time and probably has an unrealistic view of what fishing is like.

Of course the rest of the trip has more or less been covered. One thing I forgot to mention was Ben driving the 13 wheeler: in his car he also had a wheel chair, a bike, and a tricycle. So if he had to ditch the car, he was going to have a lot of options.

So that was pretty much it. This was the first trip we’ve taken with the digital SLR camera, and I’m ashamed to admit, we took over 800 pictures! According to my quick google search, if those were old school film pictures, it would take about $153 to develop them all (that’s 2010 dollars). So I guess that’s the upside. We haven’t even been able to go through them all ourselves, so I think you’ll have to wait for awhile before we get any uploaded anywhere.

I think that’s it! Already can’t wait for the next vacation!