Day 9 – Monday 30 May 2016

Hooray, a sleep in this morning, we didn’t leave until 8 am. It is raining & cold, more like almost winter not summer. We are all excited because for most of us Monet’s garden was on the bucket list.

Monet’s Garden at Giverny was our destination this morning. Our Italian driver is amazing the places he gets us through. Parisian drivers are crazy, there doesn’t seem to be any rules, they just go whichever way. Paris is an absolutely beautiful place, beautiful architecture, lovely wide roads in some places with trees, quaint street cafes, the place seems big, airy & buzzing with life. Other places the streets are very narrow & twisty with barely room to get a car through, let alone a bus.

We arrived about ½ hour later than planned at Giverny due to peak hour traffic, it was still raining. I think the rain maybe added to our experience but it didn’t stop us (we are hardy Aussies). What a treat, seeing Monet’s Garden. The house & gardens have been recreated from his paintings & one of his gardeners kept a very detailed diary – it is awash with colour, blues dominating. The lily pond & bridges are just as they were in Monet’s time. A railway line used to run through the middle of Monet’s Garden (now a road) & the soot from the coal fired steam engine used to settle on the lily leaves in the pond, he had the servants wash the soot off the lily leaves every morning.

Monet’s House is intact & a museum, furnished with Japanese & period furniture as well as examples of Monet’s art all over the walls in each of the rooms. The place was packed with tourists, it was shoulder to shoulder & all very slow walking inside the house, I would hate to be there on a warm, sunny busy day. The very large gift shop was Monet’s painting room, with examples of two of his very large water lily paintings across two of the walls. We then we walk around the very small town of Giverny, all quaint & old original buildings.

The bus journey back to Paris was full of sleeping passengers, worn out from all the walking again. We only had a short turnaround & then it was off on a boat cruise on the River Seine with Bateaux Mouches, the largest riverboat company in Paris. Unfortunately our boat was full of very loud & pushy Chinese tourists, putting a further dampener on the cold, wind & rain. The river was in flood, so had a strong current running, we moved downriver fairly fast & banged into the waves heading back upriver. However, the scenery did not let us down, passing many famous & beautiful landmarks, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre Museum, Notre Dame Cathedral, a number of different palaces, lots of old mansions and a few other museums.

The boat trip took a bit over an hour then on the way back to the hotel the bus took us on a short driving tour to get closer to some of the buildings we saw from the boat. The Louvre Museum is absolutely massive & a stunning old building, formerly a royal residence & built in the 13^th century. Another highlight was getting up close to the Arc de Triumph, what a huge structure that is & the traffic around it is absolute bedlam, there are 12 intersections running off it with the most impressive being the Champs Elysees, 2 miles long. The top end of the Champs Elysees is surrounded on either side by very expensive high end shops. At the other end it terminates in a square called the Place de la Concorde, originally the home of the guillotine that claimed thousands of victims lives including Marie Antoinette & her husband, King Louis in 1792. There is also an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the square.

An Eiffel Tower dinner in the restaurant is the agenda tonight, the weather is still very bleak, raining, cold & very windy. The wait to catch the elevator up the tower was slow & tedious, with 2 security checks plus a ticket check & sharing the elevator with lots of others. Our tour director told us that numbers of tourists are way down, the lines are usually hundreds deep. Our seat in the Eiffel Tower Restaurant was right next to the window, looking straight up the middle of the tower. The tower was lit up & looked stunning. The food was delicious, a prawn entrée followed by the best chicken dish I have ever tasted, I am not a person that usually likes chicken but this was superb. Desert was a fruit meringue, the meal was accompanied by champagne & wines. Getting down the tower was a lot quicker. The tower was lit up with a set of sparkling lights in addition to the normal lighting, it did look spectacular.