Kathy goes to Paris...alone!

  I guess if I have to go home, it is made a little easier cuz it's a very grey, very chilly, very drizzly/rainy day today.  After enjoying my last European style breakfast, at the table that I have claimed all week, in the hotel breakfast room, I returned to my room to pack.  (It sure is more fun to pack clean clothes in anticipation of leaving on a trip as opposed to packing all your dirty clothes to take home!) I had bought a little box of Poilene sable butter cookies in a cute box and gave them to the owner of the hotel when I went downstairs with my luggage.  He blew me a kiss, grabbed my hands, looked me in the eye and kept saying "merci, merci"!  I asked him to hold my luggage while I went out for one last excursion.  I wanted to go to Notre Dame and see the status of the repair work.  My Metro pass that I had loaded 20 rides on, was empty.  I added 2 more rides on it and headed out. Notre Dame is still so beautiful and the repair work...

  Well, here it is...my last full day :-( The day started out great, the guy who is always at the front desk in the morning asked me if I was from Canada!  I said that I was from California, and he was surprised because I always speak French to him!  That made me feel pretty good!  I may be the only American here, I'm not sure.  I only hear German, French and Italian being spoken of in the breakfast room.  Breakfast is served from 6:30-10:00 and I'm always down there at 7:00...if there are other Americans they must eat later than I do.  I like this desk guy because one night when I returned "home" from dinner, he was standing outside having a cigarette (of course!)...he told me to just go behind the desk and get my own key!  I feel like I have been accepted as a "regular" and that makes me so happy! I love reading books about the French Resistance and the other day in the Metro I saw an ad for a special exhibit of Women of the Resistance at L...

Day Five/ Montmartre The forecast for today was bright sunny skies with a high of 61 degrees...perfect for visiting Montmartre!   This is the largest hill in Paris and is known for its bright white basilica Sacré-Coeur, and its history of being a hotbed for artists like Renoir, Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Pissarro, Degas, Modigliani, Vincent VanGough and many  others.  So today I put on my art history nerd hat and happily headed out on the metro! The last time I was in Montmartre was in 2001 when we came with the boys.  Gary threw out his back the week before we left home. He was a trooper though and fought through the pain for most of the trip.  He did have a total melt down on the day we went to Montmartre, and I'll never forget how scared and hopeless I felt in his moment of crisis.  That may be why we never returned to this area of the city on any subsequent visits to Paris.  This is the day to change that bad mojo!  But I a...

  When I woke up today and saw that it was cold and grey, I knew it was not  the day to go to Montmartre as I had originally planned...I want a clear day for that so I can enjoy the view. I had something else in mind for today...when my wonderful god-daughter Britany went to Paris for her honeymoon last year, she commemorated the occasion by getting a tattoo of a bottle of wine and a little charcuterie plate.  I loved this idea as a permanent way to preserve a special memory. And some of you may know that I had a dream of writing a coffee-table book about pro athletes' tattoos! I knew that all their tattoos represented something personal...those are the stories I wanted to show in my book. I actually spoke with someone in publishing who thought it was a great idea; the tricky part was getting pro athletes to buy in...I had no contacts with Steph Curry, LeBron James, or Michael Phelps and others, and my dream died.  But I have been intrigued by tat...

Day Three/all over town! When I woke up this morning it was drizzly and grey and it seemed like a good day to go visit a cemetery!   I am not a big Jim Morrison/Doors fan, nor a huge Oscar Wilde fan so I never felt a burning desire to visit Pere Lachaise Cemetery (where they are both buried).  But I DID love the tv show "Lupin the Gentleman Thief".  Spoiler alert:  there is an episode where he fakes his death and there is a burial scene in that cemetery...so fictional Lupin got me to do what Jim Morrison and Oscar Wilde couldn't! The cemetery is way way over on the far right hand side of the city in the 20th Arrondissement. It is  the largest green space in Paris at 44 hectares.  It has over 70,000 graves and several commemorative monuments. I took the metro and actually met a very nice mother and grown son from LA on the metro and we walked together for a bit.  She had never been to Europe and they are in Paris for 3 week...

  Today is the day that was my inspiration for this whole trip...and it did not disappoint! Some of you may know this back story, but a little refresher for those who don't!  My grandparents (I'll just call them Oma and Opa here!) were amazing people.  In the summer of 1964, the summer I turned 8, they took me to Paris for 6 weeks.  Opa was a professor at CAL and had a summer teaching position at the Sorbonne.  We sailed over on the SSFrance and rented an apartment for 6 weeks.  I just did the math, and am shocked to realize that my Oma was 70 that summer.  I have some very clear memories of our time in Paris, and although I have been back many times to Paris, I never retraced our steps from that trip.  I felt a real need to do that this year, so I did a bit of research and studied the slides that Opa took (and meticulously labeled) and got some addresses!  Armed with that knowledge, I set off today to relive som...