We made it to Rennes and began exploring this week. The streets are very beautiful with lots of interesting old buildings. The leaning buildings (photo above) in a city square from about 1500 are literally only standing because the others are holding them up. Check out the two in the middle. There were much newer
After a week here in Angers, we can easily say that we really like it. Angers is a medium-sized city, with an incredible castle that would have been a formidable fortress to discourage potential invaders when it was built in the 9th century and expanded to its current size in the 13th century. The city
We arrived in Angers, France on Saturday evening after some minor train delays and schlepping of the bike and bags from Orléans. We’re staying in a small apartment built recently in the rear of the courtyard of an house built in the 1800s along a quiet street in the city center. Angers has been voted
We’re in the final couple of days in Orléans and packing up to go to Angers (pronounced Ahn-jzay) on Saturday. We’re saying goodbye to our favorite bakeries and trying to figure out how to get all of the belongings we’ve distributed around the apartment back into our bags. We’ve put most of our stuff in storage
One down, eleven months to go on our one-year visa! We’ve learned so much in this first month, and yet we feel that we have so much more to learn to determine where we might want to stay a while. We had a strategy when we got here and it’s still the strategy, but being
The rental car saga finally came to a quiet end on Friday (read the Day 1 and Day 2 posts if you haven’t already) after we took the train back to Blois to return the car keys and try to solve the issue of returning a car to a different facility than the one we
Today we set out for the towns of Blois and Beaugency in our little rental car (the second one following yesterday’s incident). In Beaugency we walked through a smaller, very old church with incredible stained glass windows. In many of the churches, the stained glass panels placed around the church told the stories in the
Today we took a roadtrip to visit the spectacular city of Chartres, which is north of where we’ve been in Orléans and SW of Paris. This beautiful, walkable city blew us away! They have a light show there that plays every evening with the old buildings as the backdrop to display artistic images. We had
We’re now three weeks into our year in France and our stay in Orléans. Adventures always bring unexpected learning experiences and gratitude to our lives. Here are some things that we’ve learned about during our stay in France that have been less than ideal: These are really small things though, things to experience and navigate
We spent a couple of days and a night in Paris this week. It was one of the first European cities we visited on our first magical trip in 2015 (London, Paris, and Rome) and it’s still beautiful. It’s such a huge city as you can see from this vantage point in the artsy Montmartre