I took the metro, RER train, and local bus to Le Bourget Airport. Some adventures along the way but all good with friendly help from strangers...I need to learn a little more French. The French take on aviation history was really in display at their air/space museum. Lots of stuff about French aviation history I'd forgotten, and lots of weird machines. I got to check out the newer stuff too, including walking through 2 retired Concorde supersonic airliners. I had a blast...no one else would have liked it!
When I made it back to our Paris hotel, Lynn had also returned from her adventures, so we took off together to a world-famous museum that was right AT THE END OF OUR BLOCK! It took less than 5 minutes to get to the entrance to the Musée des Arts et Métiers, housed in an ancient cathedral. It was unexpectedly fantastic...and a little indescribable. The place was full of the history of measuring devices, scientific instruments, tools, manufacturing machinery, construction techniques and machinery, communications equipment, and more and more. We found Fucault's Pendulum suspended from a high nave in the cathedral, demonstrating that the earth rotates. Right next to that old scientific instrument was the main cathedral space housing a collection of automobiles including an aerocar powered by a nose-mounted propeller. It was another unexpected cool thing we found in Paris, just by having time to explore the stuff we never had a chance to check out on previous trips!
(Lynn takes over for a short description of her day)
My morning, after John and I decided to pursue our different interests, started with finding the right place to buy a SIMS card so I can use my international cell phone and reach John and viceversa when we are off doing different things. Once again the answer to doing this was found at Les Halles in the SFR store. My phone would not work until tomorrow so I enlisted a good friend and Angie to let John know what my new number is in case we had trouble meeting back up. I then took the metro to the Marmottan Monet museum which has a most impressive collection of Monet and other Impressionist art. It was a great time for me and John didn't have to ooh and ahh over something that bores him and I didn't have to do the same over airplanes!!
I grabbed some lunch to go and headed back to the hotel where John and I met up again quite conveniently and enjoyed our afternoon at the Arts et Metiers museum he has already discussed. I really did enjoy it too in spite of what sounds like a boring amount of mechanical items....but it was so varied and interesting...and we didn't take toooo long to go through it :)We ended our evening with an early (for Paris) dinner at the close by cafe...finally John had a croque-monsieur :) now we are back at the hotel and packing for our trip tomorrow by TGV to Dinan...ready for more adventures and days perhaps less crammed with activity and more time to just relax and enjoy all this beautiful country has to offer AND interact with the people who have so far impressed us greatly by their generosity and helpfulness....so much for a wrongly earned reputation!
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| 2011 Dinan and Paris French Adventure |
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