Saturday, October 16, 2010

Giverny

We recently returned home from a two week long vacation to France. We didn't find much time to blog during the trip, so I figured we'd blog about it now, sight by sight.

We flew into Paris on September 23rd, arriving at about 9 am. The first half of our trip would be spent in the French countryside, and the first three days of that first week were spent in Normandy.

One of the pains of flying over to Europe is that flights from North America typically leave here in the late afternoon and arrive there in the early morning. In order to get your body switched to the new time zone as quickly as possible, it's important to try and get some sleep on the airplane on the flight over (nearly impossible for me) and then stay awake for the rest of the first day once you're over there. For us, that meant being awake for about 30 hours straight. It's not fun, but if you can find interesting things to see and do for that first day, it really helps.

Our hotel for the first night was in a little town named Torigni-sur-Vire in Normandy. It was about a three hour drive from the airport in Paris, so we made a list of possible sights to see along the way to fill up our first day. Our first stop was an ATM in a business park near the airport, then we hit the highway towards our first real tourist stop, Giverny.

Giverny is the location of the country home and garden of Claude Monet. I have always loved Monet's paintings, and I'd known that I'd like to visit Giverny for some time. So, we did.

We bought tickets to see the house and the garden. The garden was much larger than I was expecting. I was hoping that we wouldn't be too late in the season to see the flowers, and we weren't disappointed. It was beautiful!

Click on the photos to view a larger copy.

We always seem to end up with a lot of photos of chickens. Jeff loves taking pictures of the chickens.

4 comments:

Karen said...

Those are fabulous pictures! What kind of camera do you use?

Chuck said...

Beautiful pictures! I am sure you already know that my favorite one is of the chicken! Glad to hear you had a great trip.

Jeff and Michelle said...

Karen, it's a Canon 40D. We have a couple different lenses and a flash that we swap around on it. I can give you more detail if you'd like. I also do a little post processing on them in Photoshop Elements.

Charles, knowing that you enjoy the chicken pictures makes my annoyance at having to stand there and wait while Jeff takes photos of them seem less troublesome. :)

Jackie said...

if you have to be awake for 30 hours straight, that is a great place to do it in. wow. such beauty!