Norma, Veronica, and Pietrina do the "I'm so glad my name ends in A" thing in front of Vaux le Vicomte

Veronica and Norma do the suburbs

Veronica and her mother, Norma, visited us in early June. Unfortunately do to Dick's work schedule, we didn't get that many digicam pics but hopefully fearless photographer Veronica got her share (and can talk her husband into posting them on all that hardware he keeps bragging about).

We did a weekend drive out from Paris to see some of the sights to the remote South East and Northwest.

Saturday saw us head Southeast to two chateaux, one of them royal and rambling almost uncontrolled at the edge of the Fontanbleau forest, the other controlled and built by a great embezzler.

Vaux le Vicomte

This chateau features highly consistent architecture, gardens, and internal decorations done by three genius architects whom the king, upon first seeing the place, drafted to create Versailles. We've got many more pictures that we'll post later, but here's the ones of our crowd:

As you can see from the top page, this place was no shack. The gardens are French and gorgeous, done by Le Notre who besides Versailles, did our neighborhood park in the Tulleries. Here's a picture of its three brightest flowers:

Inside the place is similarly arrayed, but hasn't stood the test of time as well as the gardens and exterior. (Stone and shrubs outlast wallpaper every time!) Here's the view the dining room sees of tourists who get conned into buying the propaganda audio tour while holding their guidebooks. (The place was built by the greatest con artist in France, after all.)

By the way, this place claims to have the first dining room in the western world; before that you ate wherever you were. Even when Versailles was built by the same crew a little later, it lacked a formal dining room.

Fontainbleu

We chose the occasion to show Veronica and Norma Fontainbleu. (If you want more pics, try our earlier report by clicking here). Here's a picture of them in Diana's garden:

Giverny

On Mark's birthday we honored his memory by tracking back through lower Normandy to land at Pietrina's favorite spot: Monet's garden at Giverny. (Remember those pics from Maria's visit by clicking here or Francis and Ev by clicking here). Here's the three brightest flowers we found:

Ironically, this wasn't taken in Monet's garden but at the American Museum down the road -- a beautiful new museum that blends into this tiny village perfectly.

Here's a picture actually taken in Monet's garden:

Across the road from his garden, Monet later built his lily pond garden.

Bizy

We ended our weekend with a frequently overlooked spot near Giverny (in its larger neighbor town called Vernon) -- the Chateau of Bizy. This place was built in the mid 1700s by a relative of the discredited financier who created Vaux le Lecompte. It was later owned by two kings (one before and one after the French revolution) and houses a lot of first empire memorabilia (that means Napoleon Bonaparte junk).

An extensive pond system starts uphill at a spring and flows to the entrance (where we took the picture below), underground into the middle of the courtyard, and then terminates after flowing under the chateau in the garden on the other side of the chateau.

We'll post many peopless pictures later.

Thanks for joining us. Let's hope Veronica got more pictures and she and Norma saw a lot of Paris during their stay.

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