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
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
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 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
Photo from the inside of Cathedral Sainte-Croix d’Orléans, which dates back to 1288. It’s been partially destroyed and rebuilt a number of times. It’s been a busy first week here in Orléans, France. We had several critical to-dos that needed to take place this week to set us up for success in the coming year,
We made it, friends! We are in Orléans for the next 5+ weeks, exploring neighborhoods, produce markets, shops, and bakeries. We’re trying out our French on the locals when we can. Greg starts conversations with “Je parle Français très mal” (in English: I speak French very badly) and has so far found that some humility is