Ok, at the outset, I must explain that it is I who was ( and is ) lazy, not the city of Le Mans. How lazy? Well, consider that I made this trip in 2014 in the month of June. Consider also, that I am writing this sentence in July 2018. Yes, you got your maths write, I mean right! Two Score and Eight months ago, I visited the little hamlet of Le Mans. This was our…
So here we go again. Another travelogue. This time to a hunting cottage of the Kings of France. Now if you’re thinking about a run down, ramshackle wooden cabin in the woods, remember:
Right! Stage set, then. Off we went, (more…)
I’d known about the walking bit. In fact, I’d gone out of my way to buy some comfortable walking shoes. But, as the poet Burns said, the best laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. It was entirely my fault and the fault of my map-reading skills. Apparently, I’d forgotten a lot in the 40 years since I was an Eagle Scout.
Our first full day in Paris was supposed to (more…)
Day 9 of The Great Trip dawned bright, sunny and warm and off we went in our Renault 308 to Mont St Michel on the first leg of our Normandy trip. From the Paris suburb of Neuilly-Plaisance to Mont St Michel is a good 4 hour drive.
We took the slightly northern route that skirted past Rouen and Caen on towards Avranches. As we came off the country roads running through the flat lands of Normandy we (more…)
This is the concluding part of the Normandy sub-series within the Punjabi in Paris series. You can, of course, read Part 1 and Part 2. Part 2 has more pictures and even, hold your breath for this one, shaky videos!!
We left Ste Mere Eglise after a late lunch / tea of fries, beer and Coke and drove out towards Omaha beach. Drove down the highway and came to the exit ramp that would take us to St Laurent sur Mer. However, even at this late stage of the day (more…)
The Story so far This is where we left off at the end of the first part of the Normandy Notes 1: We'd missed the morning's parachute drop re-enactment after an exciting and exhausting drive in. I was thinking wistfully about the stained glass windows of the church in Ste Mere Eglise. One of our regular readers had read Normandy Notes 1 and had written in to say how sorry he was that we didn't get to…
Introductory Passage Yes, I do realize that Normandy is not in Paris and so, technically and pedantically speaking, the Punjabi can't be in Paris if he is in Normandy. You are quite right. Wrong, too. For it is entirely possible that he was in Paris when he wrote the Normandy Notes. In actual fact, he is writing this in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in the Canadian Prairies, far, far away from Paris and Normandy. So why, you ask, does…
<This is Part Three of the Punjabi in Paris series. Read the first two, too! Part 1 and Part 2 may be found, you guessed it right, congratulations!, by clicking on the words Part 1 and Part 2. Not these ones, the ones earlier in the sentence, the ones that are in blue, the cursor becomes a hand when you place your mouse over them..> As the Boeing took to the skies above Toronto, I was struck…
<Read earlier post here> Somewhere in the last week, The Beloved Bangalan, realized that we hadn't figured out the cost-benefit ratio of internal travel. Local transport within the city. Renting a car for intra-city travel made as much sense as driving your own car in New Delhi or Calcutta. I suspect a slight hesitation to trust my notoriously middle-finger based driving skills in a strange city in a far-off land. So of course a spreadsheet was produced…
Well, there you are, my dear folks. I've been there and "done" Paris, but did not get a t-shirt. Most of them had glittering fronts that said "I {heart symbol} Paris" in small rhinestones and, as you already know by now (or should), rhinestones are not right for my idiom. The trip was stressful in the planning, exhausting in it's execution, exhilarating in it's aftermath. To give you a sense of the level of stress, consider the…