tbaroundtheworld

We got up a bit late and made it out the door around 11. I guess one of the benefits of vacation is truly vacating your life. As in no horse chores at 7:30 in the morning. The weather was still dreary - cold and gray but at least it wasn't raining. Our target for this day was the Musée National du Moyen Age, otherwise known as the Cluny Museum which holds one of the finest collections of Medieval art. We took a roundabout way of getting there, passing first through the Luxembourg Gardens and past their noted palace and the up and down the hills of the Latin Quarter, pas t the Sorbonne. The Cluny is housed in a former cloister (started in the 14th century) that became a mansion (14th-15th century) that at another time was the observatory of George Messier, the noted astronomer. Today it's considered the finest extant medieval building in Paris.  On this day it was loaded with school children which made appreciating the somber nature of the religious art a bit challenging. ...

We barely made it to 8:30 on the night of our arrival; being awake for 35 hours just isn't as easy as I remember it. The apartment slowly warmed up as the night wore on, moving from "tomb-like" to "root cellar" over the course of the 11 hours we were conked out. This was a noticeable improvement over the cold that drove us to bed so early last night. The sound of rain was nice to fall asleep to but portended a cold and wet day. And once out in the street that portent was confirmed. But first a few words about our apartment. It seems to be tacked on to a much older building and judging from the stone walls, used to perhaps be a carriage house or garage. It's very spacious, much more than what we normally rent and is comprised of 1-1/2 baths, a bedroom, kitchen "fireplace room" and grand salon that even includes a grand piano. Off to one side of the big room is a nook with a pull-out bed and a wonderful old chest...

  A few weeks ago we decided that it would be nice to spend our upcoming "big" anniversary somewhere special. We talked about Rome and we discussed London, but we decided on Paris since on the romance scale, The City of Lights is pretty much in a category of its own. Now normally we would not plan on two big trips in the first half of the year, but this one was offered at a price we could not refuse - free business class tickets - the product of all those miles racked up while I was landing those 30 entrance stamps to China. So I booked the tickets and after a lot of detective work, reserved an apartment and we put everything else in motion to make the trip a reality. It's been more than 2 years since I last flew with my old pal United Airlines and so I had a sense of both the past and the present and we left Albuquerque yesterday morning. The flight to Dulles was uneventful and we arrive on time to a mostly empty terminal. After a quick sandwich and coffee we parked ou...