Day 9 – Paris to St Ives
Due to the wine consumed and the earliness of the hour we didn’t exactly spring out of bed but we managed to drag ourselves down for breakfast and get out of the hotel by 9. Trying to tick all of the boxes in the limited time available we headed straight up to Montmartre and hiked up the hill to take in the impressive Sacre Cour basilica. Then we headed straight back down again and back on to the Metro to see the cathedral of Notre Dame. From a distance, Notre Dame doesn’t really look particularly impressive, but when you are up close the many sculptures adorning the facade are really quite amazing. Even better are the intricate stained glass windows when seen from the inside with the light streaming through them.
With only a couple of hours left before we had to leave the city, we strode along the banks of the Seine to the magnificent Louvre gallery (or is it a museum?). We entered through the glass pyramid made famous by that awful Dan Brown nonsense and after battling with some broken ticket machines typical of the French efficiency we had experienced at the Eiffel Tower we got in and raced round a few rooms. Naturally, we sought out the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo as well as a few rooms of amazing ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, enormous Italian paintings, and Egyptian artefacts.
At 3.00 we caught the Metro back to Port Orleans and, after stopping at a patisserie to flex our collective linguistic muscles and order sandwiches and cakes, we go the car from its multi-storey and pointed the nose at Calais.
An uneventful 3 hour drive on smooth roads later, we pulled up at Carrefour to fill every nook and cranny of the Daimler with wine and cheese – it was so loaded up that the headlights were clearly pointing skyward and the rear suspension hit its bump-stops over the fist sleeping policeman outside the supermarket.
We managed to blag our way onto an earlier ferry than we had booked and headed back to Dover. Despite the water being as calm as a mill-pond (although it was raining), Ian won the prize for the feeblest voyage ever as he turned a nasty shade of green and made Si stop the car just outside the ferry terminal so he could turn the harbour water a nasty shade of vomit.
Two hours later we pulled up outside the house, knackered but pleased to be home. Thinking how annoying it would be to lose the 80 bottles of wine and 10 cheeses we had hauled home, we made a final Herculean effort to unload the car before going to bed.
The final day's pictures are to be found here.
So there it is, 3200.5 miles, 135.2 gallons of petrol and 10 days later we are back where we started.
With only a couple of hours left before we had to leave the city, we strode along the banks of the Seine to the magnificent Louvre gallery (or is it a museum?). We entered through the glass pyramid made famous by that awful Dan Brown nonsense and after battling with some broken ticket machines typical of the French efficiency we had experienced at the Eiffel Tower we got in and raced round a few rooms. Naturally, we sought out the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo as well as a few rooms of amazing ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, enormous Italian paintings, and Egyptian artefacts.
At 3.00 we caught the Metro back to Port Orleans and, after stopping at a patisserie to flex our collective linguistic muscles and order sandwiches and cakes, we go the car from its multi-storey and pointed the nose at Calais.
An uneventful 3 hour drive on smooth roads later, we pulled up at Carrefour to fill every nook and cranny of the Daimler with wine and cheese – it was so loaded up that the headlights were clearly pointing skyward and the rear suspension hit its bump-stops over the fist sleeping policeman outside the supermarket.
We managed to blag our way onto an earlier ferry than we had booked and headed back to Dover. Despite the water being as calm as a mill-pond (although it was raining), Ian won the prize for the feeblest voyage ever as he turned a nasty shade of green and made Si stop the car just outside the ferry terminal so he could turn the harbour water a nasty shade of vomit.
Two hours later we pulled up outside the house, knackered but pleased to be home. Thinking how annoying it would be to lose the 80 bottles of wine and 10 cheeses we had hauled home, we made a final Herculean effort to unload the car before going to bed.
The final day's pictures are to be found here.
So there it is, 3200.5 miles, 135.2 gallons of petrol and 10 days later we are back where we started.
posted by TeamXJ3 at 2:35 PM
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