Paris, France

    The thing about travel is that you never know what you are going to to see or what hardships you are going to have to endure to experience the new memories of our daily lives.  For example, we took an Uber from our condo and arrived at the airport at 4:30 on Saturday for our 6:30 flight to Paris.  Travel is an ordeal, in spite of the fact that we flew throughout the night without incident, and we met the SS Joie de Vivre, our hotel on a ship, at 2:00 pm on Sunday.  It made me feel good that Carmine Esposito was truly glad to see us and hugged us as we arrived on the ship.  Tracey and I were completely overwhelmed after 18 hours of a travel day.  What we wanted, more than anything else, was to meet up with the University of Louisville Travel Group, as we prepared ourselves for the trip of a lifetime as we navigated through the cauldrons of history that is France.

   Our first real day of travel began on Monday, March 24, as we travelled to the medieval castle of La Roche Guyon.  Our tour was good for what it was and we spent a lot of time listening to Patricia, our guide for the day.  She liked to “gab, gab, gab” while describing the intricacies of the castle, but her narrative was less than inspiring.  Stephanie was our guide in the afternoon and she led us through the Chateau Gaillard, or the old castle that was situated above the Seine River.  It was beautiful but I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were stalling; waiting for the opportunity to visit the sights of Paris, France.  Carmine wanted to save the best for last.
   Most of the travel group drove to Mont Saint Michael on Tuesday, March 25, but Tracey and I made the hard decision to skip this excursion because the bus trip was too long.  Instead, we took a walking tour of the medieval city of Rouen.  Pascalla was our guide.  The highlights of the tour included the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Joan of Arc Church, and the Market Square.  The main topic of conversation was how the French government had decided to move the retirement age from 62 to 64.  As we were leaving Rouen, thousands of protesters were entering the old city to dispute the new retirement age, and we later learned that they broke out some windows in the Market Square and they set fires in front of the church and the cathedral.  Tracey and I decided to stay on the ship for the whole afternoon to avoid the protestors and their vandalism.
   Honfleur is the old port city that sits on the Seine estuary to the English Channel.  It was a beautiful day as Barbara, our guide, showed us the historic parts of the city that are so interesting to the tourists.  We have done a lot of trips and I don’t ask a lot from these excursions; all that I want is a good guide who will show us interesting places that are new to me.  Honfluer fit the bill as the place and Barbara was the perfect guide as she blended facts with a lot of humor to make the tour more interesting.  I took a lot of pictures which I immediately posted on Facebook because that is immensely satisfying to me.
   I have been reading about D Day and the Normandy invasion since I was in middle school so I knew all about the Utah and Omaha beach landings but I never dreamed that I would actually be there.  Utah Beach was well preserved and looked exactly like it did when when our heroes landed there in 1944.  When we took our tour we saw the statues and other memorials that had been placed just off of the beach.  The people who had built a memorial even included a Higgins’ boat that the tourists could walk in to.  A museum has been built off site and it included restored Jeeps, a glider, and a C-47 plane.  Life-like mannequins were dressed up in full uniforms and it was a little eerie to take their picture.  At Pointe du Hoc, where the Rangers climbed steep cliffs to take the German command posts and artillery pill boxes, so that our infantry could land on the beaches more easily.  We visited the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach which contains rows of 2,000 white crosses, a beautiful chapel, and a huge statue that is entitled “The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves.”  Our first stop on our D Day Tour was to see the “Les Braves on Omaha Beach” steel statue which has been cemented in the sand.  Barbara led us through a prayer service, through which she had hired a trumpeter to play “Taps” while we were given a rose to place at the foot of the statue or to place in the waves on the beach.  All five of our stops on Thursday showed that the Americans can build memorials with class and reverence; that we can rise to the occasion when it is important to do so.  
   I taught world history at Sacred Heart for twenty six years and in those years I always taught a unit on the French Revolution.  This chapter of history is important to me as I took a whole class on the revolution at the University of Louisville.  It was 1989, or the two hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and Dr. Weisbach was my teacher and all of the memories of the lessons that I have learned from that class, and that I have used in my lesson plans for 26 years of teaching history, came alive to me as we toured the Palace of Versailles, the cost of which spurred on the revolution.  Tracey and I signed up for the apartment tour which gave us some alone time with the more intimate artifacts of the French monarchy.  Afterwards our guide, Aurilie, had us join the masses in the main section of the building, where we saw the famous “Hall of Mirrors,” the exact place where, after the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck founded the nation of Germany.  The portraits of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette were on display and this was quite a treat for me because I had been using those pictures as examples of French power and wealth for years.  One of the reasons why we take these trips is because it is impossible to describe the opulence and majesty of Versailles; you simply have to visit the place in order to appreciate it’s grandeur.  
   For our last day in Paris we decided to burn the candle at both ends by doing a tour of the city in the morning, the Louvre in the afternoon, and the Moulen Rouge in the evening.  Our city tour acted as a good primer for the history and architecture of Paris.  This overview was helpful because we intend to revisit the city to tour the highlights of what we have missed.  Paris is overwhelming but our appetite has been whetted for another trip to the City of Lights.  The Louvre was also overwhelming that we could not see all of the artifacts in one day so our guide, Joshua, narrowed our experience to seeing the the “three ladies,” which are the “Mona Lisa,” the “Venus di Milo,” and the “Winged Victory.”  I was distracted by the beauty of these works and, as we were leaving, Tracey said to me, “it is not crying if the tears don’t come out.  Right?”  What my blind wife meant was that she was close to having a nervous breakdown because the huge crowds at the Louvre were depriving her of room to maneuver, so she had to cling to me.  All of her skills in mobility were useless to her as we were packed into the rooms much like sardines in a tin can.  Also, the staircases and the constant escalators are difficult for blind people to navigate and the Louvre had a series of both of these things.  Tracey always makes mobility look so easy that I sometimes forget how difficult it is to be handicapped in these public buildings.  
   I didn’t have any expectations for the Moulen Rouge because I didn’t know anything about it aside from the 2001 Nicole Kidman movie, which I hated.  I could tell that this was going to be a premiere event even before entering the theater because the tickets were so expensive and the patrons were so well dressed; it was a high society crowd.  When we first walked in I was reminded of the dinner theaters from the 1950s, highlighted in The Godfather II movie, and I expected Frankie, Dino, and Sammy, to make an entrance at any minute.  The dinner menu was impressive and I am sure that it earned a five star Michelin rating.  It would be reductive to describe the show as merely a display of “tits and ass,” although that was a big part of what we saw, but we also witnessed the dancers in beautiful costumes who were fully engaged with the crowd.  Aside from the burlesque, we also saw a woman who swam in a huge water tank filled with snakes, a roller skating duet, acrobats, and two male power lifters whose specialty was strength and balance.  The show was better than anything that the Cirque du Soleil could offer in Las Vegas and our excursion to the Moulen Rouge offered a strong finish to our memorable trip to Paris.