Tuesday, Monet Day

Having spent several weeks in Paris, I'm always excited to get out into the country. Tuesday we headed to Giverny, about 50 miles from Paris. Giverny is where artist Claude Monet lived out the last 40 years of his life. Much of his art was inspired by the garden and water garden that he cultivated.

One of Monet's paintings of the "Japanese Bridge"
We stood on this along with about 90 other tourists.

One of the many Water Lily studies. Ella thought Monet got it wrong,
because the pond was much greener the day we went.

Earlier in our trip, we'd really enjoyed the Monet museum - Musee Marmottan - so we were excited to see his place. Heather (Price) loves to take people to Giverny so she offered to be our guide.

The four of us set off for Giverny, but had some transportation issues. We finally arrived well after lunch (fortunately they have delicious sandwiches at the train station). As we waited in line, we were attacked by little black "nuage" bugs. Nuage means "cloud" so you can imagine how much fun they were!

We got into the garden at about 3 p.m. along with about 900 other tourists. So much for retreating to the country! It was a hot and humid day, but the air was fragrant and fresh. Plus, they must spray the garden for those horrible little pesky bugs, so we didn't have to worry about them once we got in the gate.

The crowd swept us through the garden and onward to the pond. It was a gorgeous setting and amazing to see these scenes from so many pantings in real life!

Here's the Japanese Bridge in a photograph from the Giverny website.
(Eric has all our photos on his camera)

This is Monet's house in the spring.
There weren't any tulips in July, but believe me,
there was no shortage of gorgeous flowers.

After our tour, we headed for dinner at a restaurant down the road. We had crepes, omelettes and ice cream and this place was NOT crowed. It was very peaceful and relaxing and it had the cleanest bathroom in all of France; it even smelled good! We headed back to the shuttle bus (meeting some Americans along the way) and boarded our train. The train was wonderful, too ... air conditioned and almost empty!