2017.07.15 – Marseille (France)

After a nice breakfast at our Ibis Style hotel, we headed out to explore the city equipped with some daily transit passes. We started our visit at the Vieux Port (Old Port). We later hopped on a bus to tour the Basilique Notre Date de la Garde perched on top a hillside of Marseille. Back in the Vieux Port, we headed for a stroll through the old part of town called Le Panier. We had a long and very enjoyable lunch at a neighborhood café. Late in the afternoon, we headed back to the hotel for a rest. We noticed in the metro that some disruption in service would be taking place at night due to the re-scheduled fireworks that were postponed yesterday as part of France’s Bastille Day. Late evening, we took the metro to the closest station to the Vieux Port which was still accessible to folks wanting to see the fireworks. We stopped for an evening meal along a pedestrian walkway dotted with restaurants. Although we were several blocks away from the Old port, the launch point of the fireworks, we managed to enjoy quite a good display of fireworks while we were eating our pizza and sipping wine.

2017.07.16 – Marseille – Toulouse (France)

This morning was already time to bid farewell to Jessica as we were catching a 10:15am train to Toulouse while Jessica was catching a flight back to London in the early afternoon. Our four hour train ride to Toulouse was relaxing. At our arrival in Toulouse, we inquired about taking a taxi but even the taxi driver suggested we walk to our hotel. I realized that I was missing a Maps.me download which covered the Toulouse area. We made our way to the hotel the good old way… by asking directions from the locals at every couple of blocks. We found our hotel located in a very central and lively part of town. After our check-in, we rested a couple of hours, did some clothes washing and bought some snacks for lunch. In the early evening, we had some fast food noodles along a pedestrian walkway. Throughout our meal, we kept on seeing a steady flow of cyclists, with Uber Eats bags harnessed on their backs, coming and going along the pedestrian street. It seems this Uber-style food delivery was doing very well in town.

2017.07.17 – Toulouse (France)

This morning we skipped the expensive hotel breakfast and visited a local McDonald’s – which also appeared to be doing well in town given the number of its outlets we saw the previous day. It seemed that Mondays were the second most challenging days, after Sunday, to deal with when traveling – as many tourist attractions were closed on Monday. Hence, we missed out on a couple of such sights. We spent most of our time, exploring different neighborhoods. We briefly walked along the Canal du Midi – a waterway with locks linking the Mediterranean sea with the Atlantic ocean. In the evening, we opted for a classy hamburger restaurant. Half way through our meal, we discovered that all the restaurant patrons were using a knife and fork to eat their hamburgers. After observing them for some time, we resumed to complete eating our hamburgers with our hands. We’ve taken note to look up some YouTube hamburger eating videos upon our return home.

2017.07.18 – Toulouse – Amboise (France)

Well our friends, Peter and Zora, would be pleased with us as we finally booked our first Airbnb accommodation … in Amboise. We ended up canceling our previous Booking.com accommodation since we managed to find a better located apartment with Airbnb. The owner even coordinated with his parents to pick us up at the train station as he was currently living in New York. After our 4.5 hours train commute with two connections, we arrived at the small town of Amboise along the long La Loire river. As we hoped for, given the exceptionally warm day (34C), the father of our apartment owner greeted us at the exit of the train station. After a short drive into town, we got introduced to our nice apartment for the next two evenings. We bought some groceries for our stay and enjoyed a home cooked meal. In the evening, we went for a stroll and discovered the lively food market and dancing entertainment on the town’s main street.

2017.07.19 – Amboise (France)

After our breakfast, we started our day by visiting the beautiful Château d’Amboise – which we felt specifically meaningful to us as it housed some of the royals portrayed in the tv series The Reign. We somehow welcomed the very light and short rainfall this morning – the first of our trip. In the mid afternoon, we went to visit the popular Clos Lucé – which was where Leonardo Da Vinci lived the last three years of his life. The place showcased models for many of his innovations and offered a large 27 hectares garden to stroll in.

2017.07.20 – Amboise – Paris (France)

As our train reservations were for 2:20pm, the owner’s parents agreed to let us stay at the apartment until our departure for the train station. The father had kindly volunteered to drive us back to the train station – a gesture we greatly appreciated. We spent our last few hours in Amboise strolling some quiet neighborhoods, specifically along the La Loire river bank. As we had noticed upon our arrival in town, the La Loire valley appeared to be a bicycle tour stop-over along a 800km well mapped out bicycle route. We saw a wide range of touring styles – from the fully loaded bicycles to the very lightly loaded ones.

We took another two trains, an hour each, into Paris. Upon our arrival, we made our way to our cozy apartment in the Montmartre neighborhood – aka 18ième arrondissement. After coming out of the metro, we started to walk towards our apartment address just to realize that we would be staying at the top of the neighborhood. Unfortunately, there was no way to avoid a series of long staircases to get to our very artistic area of Place Tertre. The square was a host to several dozens of artists ready to draw a caricature or portrait of anyone and everyone. We struggled a bit to meet up with our apartment owner, nonetheless we connected. We realized that the Booking.com was not kidding when it described the apartment as cozy – somewhat of an overstatement.

After settling in, we were stepping out of the apartment to head out for supper when we realized that the high security door equipped with three series of horizontal rods were not properly sliding into the door frame. As the lock only worked with a key, I stepped into the apartment to better assess the sliding rod mechanism. On the other side of the door, I asked Jenny to lock and unlock the door. She managed to lock the door but she began to be distraught when she could no longer unlock the door. After spending more than fifteen minutes trying to unlock the door, we realized that I was locked in the apartment while Jenny and Victoria were on the other side of the door. I managed to place a call to the apartment owner via our voip soft-phone on our laptop. He was somewhat hesitant to believe our story as the door and its lock were less than a year old and they had been working “perfectly” since then. After several repeated calls, I urged the owner to send over a locksmith as I was observing that the door’s locking mechanism was not moving at all. After two hours of regular phone call updates, the owner and locksmith showed up at the apartment. Well, the locksmith confirmed that some of the locking rods were still extended into the door frame but he needed to get into the apartment to resolve the issue. Luckily for us, there was a 14’ ladder lying on the ground of the inner courtyard and our apartment had a window facing the same courtyard. The unfortunate thing was that the ladder was still 4’ short of our window sill.

Nonetheless, the locksmith was confident that he could make it inside our apartment. For a brief moment, I felt like Juliette waiting to be freed by Romeo. I wondered whether this Russian locksmith was a part of an elite military team in his country as he swiftly climbed the ladder and with an ultimate upper body pull, he managed to climb through the window. After fifteen minutes or so, he managed to release the locking rods using tools from his small tool bag – in which I was almost expecting to see some torture implements as well.

The locksmith spent another 30 minutes trying to file the edge of the door frame plates which were ultimately hindering the proper operation of the locking rods. The apartment owner, his girlfriend and the locksmith eventually gave up and the locksmith proposed to come back tomorrow to re-install the metal plates. The door locking mechanism was working perfectly without them. When asked by the apartment owner the reason for the problem, the locksmith suggested that the door frame had shifted due to humidity. I preferred my explanation – the door lock never worked properly. After more than three hours, we managed to step out of the apartment. We enjoyed some Chinese soup as the last customers of the restaurant for the evening. The restaurant owner enjoyed speaking Mandarin with Jenny and French with Victoria and I. We returned to our apartment hoping we would not have any further door lock issues during our stay.

2017.07.21 – Paris (France)

We had a lazy morning start as we walked to a neighborhood café for breakfast. We opted to purchase a three day transit pass as we would likely be leveraging the metro and bus services extensively over the next few days. As our first tourist attraction, we decided to visit the Notre Dame Cathedral. Later on with we opted to drop by Paris’ Catacombs. After a few metro connections, we arrived at our destination only to be confronted to a long line-up – most likely above an hour wait. We gave up promising to return another day. Although, we initially thought of not cooking meals in our tiny apartment, we reversed our position and bought groceries supplies.

After our evening meal, I lead Jenny and Victoria on a walking tour of the Montmartre neighborhood as laid out in our travel guide. We wrapped up our do-it-yourself tour with a series of city bus rides.

2017.07.22 – Paris (France)

As it rained early morning, we thought we would try our chance again at visiting the Paris Catacombs. Once we got there, we were confronted to an even longer line-up than the previous day. We opted instead to visit the Jardin du Luxembourg, followed by a brief visit of the Eiffel tower area. While walking towards the tower, Victoria and I had a good laugh as Jenny’s shoulder received a bird dropping coming from the tree. On a different note, we noticed that security controls had increased considerably since our first visit in 2011. We saw military presence in almost all tourist sites we visited in France. We bought some take-out rotisserie chicken and fried rice for our evening meal which we ate at the apartment.

2017.07.23 – Paris (France)

In an attempt to avoid long queues at Château de Versailles, we aimed to get there early. We had a very early breakfast in our apartment and started our metro/bus journey by 8am. After two metros and a long bus ride, we managed to arrive at Versailles by 9:40am. Upon our arrival, we were simply astounded by the long line-up. Unfortunately as we bought our tickets on-line yesterday, we were now committed to our visit of Versailles. During our one and a half hour wait for the entrance to Versailles, we concluded that the long queue was mostly coming from the many dozen of tour buses dropping off their passengers. After the usual security control into the building, we opted to visit the washroom but gave up due to the long wait. Instead we walked out of the building in order to start our visit of the extensive gardens – over 800 hectares. We enjoyed walking the gardens and discovering several dozen amazing fountains which were, exceptionally on our day of visit, shooting water while classical music was playing throughout the grounds. We spent over seven hours visiting the palace grounds. Before our departure, we inquired from staff on how to proceed to visit the Château. We learned that visitors were expected to visit the Château before the gardens, and that we needed to queue again outside – a queue which was still fairly long. We finally managed to convince the entrance attendant that we had missed the Château’s visit because of our attempted washroom visit. Shortly after being allowed to enter the Château we almost regretted it as we felt like cattle being driven from one empty castle room to the next – totally drowned in a sea of tour bus visitors. We were relieved after some 30 minutes walk-through of the famous Château. Thankfully, our long stroll in the gardens made this day trip worthwhile. And, according to Victoria’s iPhone, we even broke our trip record for distance covered with some 15 kms.

2017.07.24 – Paris (France) – London (England)

We had a lazy morning. We headed to McDonald’s for breakfast as we used up all our food supplies at the apartment. We visited the Sacré Coeur basilica, only a block away from our apartment, and we listened to the 11am mass. We later paid for a visit to its dome, some 300 steps up, which provided some great views over Paris. We had managed to leave our luggage in the apartment until 4:00pm after which we made our way to the train station for our Eurostar departure scheduled for 8:15pm. We spent all of our waiting time in a nice café with free wifi while catching up with our blog. In order to ride the Eurostar train from Paris to London, passengers were subject to almost the same procedures as at an airport – except that you carry on your own luggage. The two hours train ride was uneventful but always fast! This time, it was Jessica’s turn to greet us upon our arrival at London St. Pancras train station. We hitched an Uber ride to Jessica’s flat and got introduced to Freddie, the princess cat of the flat.