Just Chunnel It: Paris to London and on to Brands Hatch

Huh?

I was pretty sad to leave France for Great Britain. My reasons were that we only had a couple more weeks to go on our trip and that we were going to places where we could understand the language, at least if it was written. Growing up in San Antonio, I'm used to being in groups of people who speak a language I really don't understand very well and I find that comforting. You can tune a lot out, sort of like turning off a hearing aid.

Our chunnel tickets from Paris to London put us on the Eurostar train at about noon on Thursday, October 15th, so we had plenty of time to eat breakfast at our hotel in Paris and take the Metro to the Gare du Nord. There we had to go through some serious security, similar to getting on a plane -- plus passport checks.

The train was a fast one and it went through the French countryside for a long time before we went under the English Channel. As 1st class passengers, we got a nice meal and it was a quick and enjoyable ride. The Wikipedia link has some good pictures and the Eurostar link tells a lot about the train service.

We were able to buy some pounds (of course the Brits couldn't use Euros) in the station before we left, so we didn't need to do that in a big rush when we arrived at the Eurostar terminus at St. Pancras train station.

We immediately got transportation passes, a Tube map like this one and a bus map. I couldn't find a good picture of a bus map online and we used ours to smithereens, so you'll have to trust me about that.

Rather than take the Tube to Victoria Station which is near where we stayed, we decided to take the bus. I couldn't resist the double-decker red buses waiting outside the station. It was a bit of a ride, but we got there okay and everyone was helpful along the way even though we were arriving and traveling at rush hour. We used the buses a lot in London.

Our directions said that the hotel was about a 15 minute walk away, so upon our arrival at Victoria, we headed down to the Luna Simone Hotel. If you look it up on TripAdvisor, there are tons of pictures of it that people have taken. I'd made reservations for one night and then for 4 additional nights after we went to Brands Hatch for the weekend. They gave us the same room both times.

This is a picture I got from the pictures people have contributed to TripAdvisor. Although Trout disagrees with me about this, our room was the one on the right with the black wrought iron balcony over the doorway.

Pretty much all of the houses on this street looked the same. As we walked along, we kept losing the address. It turned out that if the house is on a square, the street name is the name of the square and the numbering starts over. And don't count on all the odd numbers and even numbers to be on the same sides of the street, either.

It was a cheap sleep by London standards with a typical English breakfast. Frankly I preferred the skimpier French breakfast to having pork and beans in the morning, but when we returned for the rest of our stay, we were able to get yogurt everyday, so that helped.

The next morning, Friday the 16th, we loaded up our packs again after breakfast and walked back to Victoria Station. Since we couldn't check into our room at Brandshatch Place early, we had plenty of time for me to arrange for the rest of our travel in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

It turned out that the best thing for us to do was to buy a Senior Pass. That allowed us to get great discounts on all our British train travel as well as on the ferry that went from Scotland to Northern Ireland.

So why did we go to Brands Hatch? Racing, of course. Every year in mid-October the Formula Ford Festival is held at the Brands Hatch Circuit. Trout's been talking about going there for the past 20+ years, so part of our itinerary planning was for us to be there for that event.

After getting our British train travel set up, we got open round-trip tickets to Longfield, Kent -- the closest train station to our hotel and to the track. Fortunately, a taxi was right there when we arrived (the trains run frequently). We took the taxi to the hotel, checked in (we were still early, but the room was ready) and ate lunch in the bar.

I went back to the room to ease out, watch the telly, read or whatever. Trout put on his pack, took the camera and walked over to the track. After floundering a bit on getting in, he finally made it into the track and got his ticket for the weekend.

I finished my book. It got dark. No Trout. We had dinner reservations at the nice restaurant in the hotel. No Trout. Finally he called and he had gotten himself lost getting back out of the track to walk home. Keep in mind that when he finally got to the road it was narrow, no sidewalk, no shoulder and they were driving on the wrong side! He thought he was so lost that he would be late for dinner, but he actually showed up about 15 minutes after the call. We had a lovely meal with some of the best sorbet/gelato of the whole trip -- green apple.

These are a few select pictures of what he saw there. He sat in the same place for the whole weekend. This is an overview shot.

These are some cars getting ready for the start.

Here they are in the 1st turn.

Here they are coming down the hill opposite the stands.

Of course, he ran into some other Americans on Saturday. In fact on Sunday he was so excited to get back over there that he skipped the hotel's wonderful breakfast.

So what did I do while he was at the track for 2 1/2 days? Not much. The hotel had lousy TV reception, but they did have a lot of DVDs to borrow. Even though the sound was very low on the TV, I watched Gone with the Wind and a couple of other movies and continued to read. I also enjoyed (yes, enjoyed) having the time to catch up on some accounting work relating to the Trip.

He was at the track all day on Sunday and I had to check out of the room at 11:00, so I spent the day in the sitting area of the hotel reading and writing postcards. I had lunch there and waited and waited and waited. I went for a walk in the direction of the track and then came back. As I was coming back a local woman exuding tea cosy nice offered me a ride, but I told her where I was going. I was actually cutting through one of those walking turnstyle thingies that are so common in England. They allow you to cross across public or private lands so as to avoid the aforementioned lack of shoulders.

Finally Trout got back to the hotel, we got a taxi back to the Longfield train station, took the train back to London Victoria, walked back to our hotel and checked back in for the rest of our stay in London.

Our first night in London, Thursday the 15th, we went out to dinner at a traditional English place right around the corner called Chimes. I seemed to have better luck at picking English food than Trout did, but his was passable. We were definitely not in France (or Italy or Spain) anymore.

Sunday night after we checked back in, we tried another recommended place called Grumbles. It was late and we were tired and cranky, especially me. We sat down at a table, got some bread and sparkling water, and all the lights went out. The place was packed. At first it was kind of fun, but then we found out that they couldn't cook anything for us because the power was out. So we left.

We went to Chimes again and their power was also out. We talked to someone on the street and he said that the power was okay on the next street over, and that he had just eaten at the Queen's Arms, so that's where we ended up for another English dinner. This time it wasn't so good as at Chimes, but we managed to eat.

It turned out that the power is so old and flakey in that part of town that some apartments in the same building had power and some didn't. The restaurants had gas for cooking, but they couldn't cook because the exhaust fans were electric, so they had to shut down their kitchens. Maybe Lucas is the Prince of Darkness for public utilities, too.

We did go back to Grumbles later in the week and had a lovely meal there. The manager was very apologetic again and was surprised that we'd returned. I'll include a fun picture from there on a later blog posting.

We did enjoy coming home at night and watching a little TV in English. It was fun to see "Bones" dubbed in German or French but better to see it in English. I do think you can learn a lot about a place based on the TV programs locally produced or available there. You can also pick up on colloquial speech patterns that are charming. One of our favorites was the use of "cloud" in the weather reports to mean cloudy or clouds, as in "there will be lots of cloud today".

Paris: Jim Morrison's Grave & Notre Dame

Our itinerary for Wednesday, October 14th was to find Jim Morrison's grave at Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, visit Notre-Dame and go to the Louvre. Rather than travel underground on the Metro, we decided to take the bus to Pere-Lachaise.

Here's my bus map again. We were staying the in the 7th Arrondissement near the Champ de Mars. The cemetery is in the 20th Arrondissment near Gambetta. They are catty-cornered across the map from each other. In case you didn't know, Paris is divided into 20 municipal districts called "arrondissements." They start in the center of the city and spiral out, so small numbers are in the older parts of the city and large ones are in the newer, at least by Parisian and European standards.


The #69 bus route is a famous tourist one not only because it's pickpocket heaven but also because it passes by a number of main attractions and takes you from the Eiffel Tower (near our hotel) to Pere-Lachaise Cemetery. You may be able to follow it a little better on this section of the bus map. Read the Wikipedia article linked for more detail on the cemetery and the reasons for its location outside the city, at least at the time of its founding in 1804.

It took a long time to get there and of course we got our usual late start, but we got to see a lot along the way.


Pere-Lachaise Cemetery is significant because so many famous people are buried there. More fun than the Wikipedia article linked above is the virtual tour. If you go there, you can find the graves of many of the famous, click on their flashing crosses and see pictures of their tombs. The easiest way to do that is to scan the alphabetical list. A more serendipitous way is to just mouse over the crosses. The name of the person buried there will appear. Then you can click on the cross and see the tomb.


Probably one of the surprises to many Americans who go to Europe (and other places) is that the cemeteries tend to be chock-a-block with graves and tombs. Land is at such a premium that no cemetery we saw anywhere, except perhaps in Iceland, had much space around any of the graves.


This is what it looked like walking in. The Wikipedia pictures are good, but too nicely photographed to give a realistic view of the crowding in Pere-Lachaise.

Our one goal was to find Jim Morrison's grave. Armed with a map, we finally did. Once again I wished we'd had more time because I would like to have visited the graves of some other people as well. Maybe next time. As you can see, his grave is very modest and crowded in among a bunch of other much more impressive tombs. It's very popular, though. Even in the middle of the day on a Wednesday, there were people looking for it like us and standing there when we found it.

Many ignorant people think that the inscription on it, KATA TON DAIMONA EAYTOY, has some evil meaning. It really means, True to His Own Spirit, but perhaps Jim would enjoy people thinking that he's a demon. He's always been one of my spirited favorites.

After finding it, we realized that the instructions we had for getting to Pere-Lachaise routed us around to an entrance that was almost as far away from his grave as it could be, at the top of the interactive map. Our bus actually passed by the main entrance which was very close to it, at the bottom of the interactive map.

Before we left the cemetery, we both used the public restrooms. That was a big mistake. However, it put us on a street where we saw this in the window of some cemetery-related business. Of course, Trout had to go in.

There was one woman working there. I don't think she was the owner of the car. I don't think the owner was there because I'm sure s/he he would've come out and talked to us about it.

We decided to take the Metro back to Notre-Dame. We got on at one of the frequently photographed Art Nouveau entrances.

Cathedrale Notre-Dame de Paris is known round the world and is one of the most famous buildings anywhere. My link goes to the official website which has way more information and better pictures than I could ever provide here. Be sure to click on the building history. As with so many other Christian churches, it was built on the site of a Roman temple. The current building was started in the 12th century and is Gothic in style.

This is really the only place on the trip where Trout was approached by thieves in the guise of beggars. At first he would say "Da!", pretending to be Russian until I told him that meant yes, so he switched to "Nyet!" Either seemed to work, though.

One of the first things we saw when we went inside was the colors of the stained glass on the wall of the nave.

This choir wall, built to shelter the choir and the priests during the Middle Ages, was my favorite thing in the church. It's like a large 3D wooden storyboard telling the story of Jesus from birth to resurrection.

Of course, the stained glass, painting and sculpture in the side chapels is also quite impressive.

Remember that this church is devoted to the Virgin Mary, so there are many depictions of her with the Christ child.

This altar piece is very similar to the Pieta in Rome.

Did I say the stained glass is one of the special things about Notre-Dame?

After Notre-Dame it was time to go to the Louvre. We got on the Metro again and got off in the basement shopping area connected with the museum. It is so huge that we got a little mis/disoriented. We had lunch in the underground, found our way in (finally) and headed for the Mona Lisa. We were there at a good time. The Mona Lisa wasn't mobbed and the rest of the museum was tolerable.

You can visit some selected works from the museum online going to the overview of the collection and clicking on the kind of work you want to see. Since we headed straight for the Mona Lisa, we spent quite a bit of time looking at Italian Renaissance painting. I'm particularly fond of Northern Renaissance work as well, so we also looked at Flemish and Dutch painting.

My other must see here was to stroll through the antiquities collections from Eqypt and the Near East.

As with the other major museums we went to, Trout was somewhat overwhelmed at the size of the Louvre. You can get visual overload which makes you just as tired as the walking around.

Before getting back on the Metro for home, we stopped at a Starbucks in the Carrousel de Louvre, the underground shopping mall. It was just a little piece of home with a French twist.

When we tried to buy tickets for the Metro to head back, the ticket office was closed. There was a guy there selling tickets, but everything I read said that people would try to sell you used tickets and then disappear when you tried to use them. Fortunately, I had saved back 2 tickets from the carnet I got when we arrived, so we had those to use.

We got back to our room early enough that we decided to do our laundry before going to dinner. There was a great place right in the neighborhood and we managed to get everything dry before it closed at 9:00 p.m. It was run by a Spanish family and the abuelo came in around 8:30 to clean up before closing. The rest of the family arrived about 20 minutes later. Naturally, we were their last customers and they were surprised when I spoke to them in Spanish.

For our final dinner in Paris, we went to another neighborhood place, La Terrasse du 7eme. We passed it constantly walking around the neighborhood, it was open late and it was great. They didn't make us rush and we didn't need to because our train for the chunnel to England didn't leave until about noon the next day.

I was surprised at how much I liked Paris and how much I felt at home there. My whole life, no matter where I visit, I speculate on whether or not I could live there. Now that my time for living anywhere is greatly limited, I wonder if I would enjoy going back for an extended period of time. I could easily see us renting a small apartment in Paris for a few weeks until we were ready to move on.

At our hotel we met a couple from Ballard, a Scandinavian neighborhood in Seattle. She was retired, but he was still working, so they only had 3 weeks for vacation. They flew to Paris, rented a car and for 2 of the 3 weeks, drove all over France with no particular itinerary or reservations, stopping in places that looked good. They returned their car to the airport and took public transportation into the city for the last week of their trip. I thought this was a great idea for our next visit to Spain or France or Ireland or Scotland or England or Iceland or Italy or... or... or...

Paris: Arc de Triomphe & Toyota Showroom

If you noticed the time in that picture of the clock at the d'Orsay, it was 4:30 p.m. If you click on this great Planetware map of central Paris, you can find the d'Orsay just about in the middle of the map on the Seine. Keep in mind that we were staying on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais about 1/2 block from where it intersects with Avenue Bosquet and Avenue de la Motte Piquet. So all the things we did on our first full day in Paris were actually pretty close to each other.

We wanted to go from here to the Arc de Triomphe, but not underground. Our Paris bus and Metro maps were indispensible in finding our way around town. This is straight from the RATP's website.

I cropped the picture of the bus map to show our bus route on bus #73 from the d'Orsay to the Arc de Triomphe via the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysees.

I pulled this picture of the Place de la Concorde off Google images. On the bus we made a circle around the obelisk and past the buildings before we actually got on the Champs Elysees.

This picture from the Wikipedia article on the Champs Elysees is the best I could find. It appears to be taken with a long lens from a building on the other side of the obelisk.

This street level picture looks a bit more like it looked from the bus. It is a magnificent avenue whether by bus, car, bike or on foot.

Our destination was the Arc de Triomphe but just riding along the street was amazing. We got to our stop and got off. There were lots of people milling about, but it's a popular area with tourists and Parisians alike, so we didn't think anything about that. There's a tunnel you have to take to get to the Arc because it's in the middle of a big traffic round about. There were police there who wouldn't allow us to go into the tunnel because of the ceremony. What ceremony?, we were thinking.

Then the people milling about starting to organize. Still we didn't know what was going on. Some Americans nearby said it was a ceremony honoring women. We later found out that at 6:30 p.m. every day, a symbolic rekindling of the eternal flame for the tomb of the unknown soldier from WWI is held here. My guess is that many evenings feature specific groups.

Please notice the man in the middle here with all the medals. I think he may be one of the last living veterans of WWI.

Things hadn't quite got going yet, so cars were still going by.

People carried big wreaths to lay at the tomb.

Traffic finally stopped and peope started the walk to the Arc. This is long walk for some of these very old people. I won't even mention the cobblestone street.

Notice the guy here in the red beret carrying a flag right in the middle of the picture. His left leg is a peg leg. One of the Americans we talked to saw him in the tunnel and said he was missing both his left arm and his left leg.

After they got past this corner, we went to the edge of the round about. You can see they are still walking across at the left.

A little beefcake for the women in my audience and maybe for some of the guys, too.

...still walking across...

...a little more beefcake...

...still walking...

After everyone has crossed, they allowed the traffic to go by.

Note the sizes of the cars. In general, the cars in France were bigger than those in Italy, but most are still very small.

With the release of the cars, we could also use the tunnel to go across and watch the ceremony up close.

It's just so French.

If you look at this picture closely, you can see the peg leg of the guy I pointed out before. He's holding a flag in the middle of the picture. You can also see his red beret.

You can go up into the top of the Arc for a view of the city, but we couldn't do that during the ceremony.

With a huge police presence, the square/round about was almost deserted.

We tried to go around front and were blocked. Then we noticed some official looking black cars. We realized that they were the same cars we saw barreling through the city with police escort while we were waiting for the bus back at the d'Orsay. I think they were headed here.

If you look in the middle bottom of this picture, you can see Trout's beige pants and orange pack.

The ceremony seemd to go on forever. Even I lost patience for watching it. We were able go back through the tunnel and cross the street. We crossed again to walk back the way we came, but on the opposite side of the Avenue des Champs Elysees than the way we came on the bus.

This is a very famous and expensive part of Paris. Cafe au lait here will cost 3 times what it costs in other places in town. Joan and I stayed near here when she visited me in Germany, but we were in an Army recommended B&B on a side street. It was not expensive at all or we couldn't have afforded it.

This picture, also from Wikipedia, looks a lot like it did as it was turning dark and the lights were coming on while we walked.

The reason we walked was partly to do it, but mostly because the avenue has a number of automobile showrooms that feature concept cars. Trout noticed the one for Toyota while we were on the bus.

Or maybe he saw this engine.

We spent quite a bit of time here. It was a Tuesday (10/13), so it wasn't very busy.

I could tell you that we came in to see these Toyota green cars.

But you all know better than that. I could see myself in this one.

And in this one.

Trout was seeing himself in this one, too.

But mostly in this one.

And this one.

He could have actually gotten into this one and "driven" on the road on the screen like this guy is doing.

But he decided to aquiesce to my silliness instead.

When we got done here, we were both pretty tired and it was time to head back to the room and rest a bit before going out to dinner. Please refer to the map at the beginning or the one below. We were about at the Avenue George V which crosses the Seine and comes very close to the avenue our hotel was on, so we were not really that far from our hotel.

We walked for awhile, got a little lost on some back streets and ended up catching a bus that took us right home. Like I said, those bus and Metro maps were essential.

This was the night that we ate at the little bistro that we can't remember the name of. However, we do know that we got ice cream along the Rue Cler for dessert. No big surprise, eh?!