Giverney, Vernon, and home visit

Giverny!! What a great place. The house, the gardens, and the water garden. I have a few pictures, which don’t really do it justice. This is where Monet lived and painted. He had this large garden which is really quite beautiful, and now in spring is absolutely fabulous.

We’d been here before, but it was summer, and there were nowhere near so many flowers. The house is pretty much as it was when Monet lived here, and has even more Japanese prints than I remembered. Unfortunately, you can’t take pictures inside the house.

  Yesterday was the first day this had been opened since last winter, so it was pretty busy.  The place was blooming, a riot of tulips, narcissis, and all sorts of other flowers that   bloom in the spring, tra la.  You can also see that it takes a lot of gardeners to keep this up. 

From the house and garden, we went through an underground passageway to the water gardens. These are where the famous water lilies were painted.

After the garden we raced back to the ship, so we wouldn’t miss lunch, since we had finished breakfast at 9 a.m. and now, good lord, it’s 12 and we might pass out any minute now. Since we were going to go on our home visit today, a little goodie Grand Circle does where you get to go see how the locals live – or at least any locals who are willing to have 8-10 old farts wander through their houses and feed them local specialties – I decided to go for a walk through the town instead.

But I forgot, this is France. And in rural France, Monday is the day the shops don’t open, and they especially don’t open during lunch time, because meals are sacred in France. Which of course makes you wonder why they aren’t all as fat as, say, we are.

I visited the wonderful old church in Vernon, which lost most of its stained glass windows during the war and has had them replaced with modern, abstract, stained glass windows.

As an added attraction, the organist was inside practicing. It was a good sounding organ, too. I imagine he was practicing for Easter, so I got lucky.

After I left the church, I wandered around town a little. The only things open were the patisseries and boulangers.

I went into one, and they had a whole cabinet (the picture is one third) of large, handmade and decorated Easter candies.

After that I went back and had a salad anyway. Well, it’s free food, after all. And as long as I was having a salad, I really should try the little open-face ham and cheese sandwich, and then it wouldn’t really be polite to leave the table when the dessert came, now, would it?

With that under my belt, or rather hanging over my belt at this point, I lumbered off to our room to get ready to go on the home visit. This is a feature of Grand Circle that is sometimes quite successful, and sometimes merely okay, and occasionally, wonderful. This one was pretty successful.

Our hostess was named Maida and she was charming, and spoke flawless English, because she had been raised in Egypt! At first I thought she said she was a diplomat, but I later decided her parents had been diplomats.

She was very open and welcoming, showing us her neighborhood and her house which she and her husband bought two years ago. It has a lawn about the size of a football field and consists of a two-story house, a courtyard, and a 2-1/2 story guesthouse. All of these places were very homey and interesting, because it was a three- or four-hundred year old house, in places. There had been additions over that time period, needless to say.

Grand Circle home tours are occasionally very stilted, because the group usually hasn’t paid any attention to what is going on in the particular area, so even if a host is willing to answer a million questions, they don’t have any. So they fill up the time with food. In our case, pear cider (a very slightly alcoholic beverage) homemade pear tart, plus macarons and cream puffs without the cream. I had seconds on everything but the cream puffs.

And then we had to hurry in order to make it back by dinner, because we might be lost and starving if we didn’t eat soon.

I did have time to do my PT exercises before dinner out on our gracious and charming balcony .  It's basically as wide as I am.  If I gain any more girth on this trip, I won't be able to fit on it.  It's never actually been warm enough to sit outside comfortably, though, so it provides a convenient extra place to dry our laundry and adds to the classy look of the ship sailing down the river.

When I really wanted to stretch out outside, I had to relax in Monet's garden.