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22 June, 2009

Today was one we’d been excited for through most of the trip: the Monet gardens. After stocking up on a variety of pastries for the train ride, we headed to Gare Saint Lazare and bought our ticket to Vernon, the closest station to Giverny. It’s only about forty-five minutes by train. To get to Giverny, where the actual Monet locations are, you can take some stupid bus or shuttle or whatever, or you can rent bikes! One guess what we chose. The bar right next to the train station at Vernon probably makes most of their money by renting out bikes. They’re certainly not state of the art, but they have two wheels, a seat, and a basket at least. We get a map to guide us there, but the directions are basically, go straight until you cross the river, then take the second right. Past the river, it’s bike path all the way. It’s nice to not have to worry about cars, and be able to see the greenery and all the houses and B&B’s. (Mom, you would love these bed & breakfasts! I think you and Dad should look into retiring here and running one.) The whole trip is only 4km, but we had to stop a couple times to fix the chain on my bike, it kept slipping off the gears.

Once there, it was only a short line to get in to Monet’s house and gardens, and I was surprised how relatively inexpensive it was, only 4.50 euro each. We toured the house first, and it was nice that there weren’t too many people visiting. I was even by myself in the kitchen for a minute! I touched the stove, even though you’re not supposed to. The house is all nice, bright, spring time colors, with windows in just about every room overlooking the garden, and a large but cozy dining room painted daffodil yellow, and a sky blue kitchen with blue and white tiles. In addition to reproductions of many of Monet’s works on the walls, there were tons of Japanese paintings, including many by Hokusai, a favorite of ours.

The gardens are large; though nowhere near the size of some of the others we’ve seen (Versailles, Jardin des Plantes). Still, we spend a few hours walking around and taking pictures, enjoying the scenery. There are, however, a ton of school groups there, so occasionally you have to duck to the side while a gaggle of six year olds go parading past. There are two separate gardens, the one by the house with rows upon rows of flowers (roses and poppies were primarily in season and prominent); and the water garden, with the famous bridges, water lilies, and weeping willow. There are paths through both, and more benches than we’ve seen at any other garden – very conducive to painting.

After we’d seen everything at the gardens, we exited back onto Rue Claude Monet, and looked through some of the smaller gardens, restaurants, boutiques and galleries along the road. There was a pretty field of wildflowers at one point. Getting back on our bikes, we stopped at the church of Giverny, though we didn’t go in, but we did see Monet’s tomb where the artist and many of his family members are. Biking back to Vernon, the bikes worked fine, but we stopped a few times for photo opportunities of the countryside. We returned the bikes and caught a train back to Paris that put us in the city just around dinnertime. We took the metro back and stopped for Happy Hour again at Cavalier Bleu, on our corner in front of Pompidou. Again, Kyle had his chicken club sandwich and I had the quiche of the day, with some drinks. We really enjoy that restaurant, it’s a great place to hang out.

A note about our pictures: we’re already at album 6! We’ve taken a ridiculous amount. So many in fact, that we’ve reached our allowed storage limit for the website. Bummer. But, we’re trying to find a way around it, maybe we’ll start a new account, but we’ll post whenever the Monet pictures are up, it truly was a spectacular place.

-Steph