Day 14 Giverny – A rose by an other name is still a rose. (Or Pigs with Lipstick are still .....)

Day 14 Tues. Oct. 28th 2008

Today was our last excursion day. It was down to 10 degree Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), but it was sunny.


Okay cloudy. Errr, I mean raining, or rather all three, at the same time, and in sight of each other.








I’ve never seen such a busy sky – black clouds, God light, impressionistic spotting/dotting of light on fields, paths, estates, cow licks, and Châteaux.







It would have been the perfect day to go to Giverny (Home of Monet and his Water Lilies) if we had done so ONE WEEK before.





It was still gorgeous, but the first frost had taken his toll, squeezing off life to many leaves and flowers, leaving only a handful surviving on the water lily pads.





Leaves had fallen and cleaned out many a tree’s leaf bank, but some trees still had vivid vestiges of their previous splendor.





The skies were the saving grace today. The sun would shyly appear and slowly disappear making only a partial appearance from behind various shapes and colors of clouds.




The effect made pointillism a reality, with highlighting juxtaposed with deep darkness.


Like many days on this trip, there was an enthralling Kodak moment at every turn. Our Canon Digital Rebel XTI was gobbling up images and we simply turned, framed an area, and let him do his thing.

We have a number of lenses for this Canon, but if you are not a professional photographer and possibly no one except you will ever see the pics and appreciate the memories they bring, then most lenses lay, waiting their turn to be used (generally in the trunk of the car having a party with the other assorted camera goodies that I have purchased over time (tripods, cleaning fluid, microfiber cloths,) rarely see the light of day. If I ever implied that I am anything but a typical American when it comes to Tech toys, I have been misleading you.



We have every gadget that goes with any other gadget, but we have found the learning curve too steep to utilize many of them.



They all seem so enticing in the infomercials or on the tech sites or even in real life in the store.





Take my advice (although clearly I don’t follow it myself)
Don’t buy it if you aren’t going to use it.
The dilemma is - How do you know you won’t use it, unless you already have bought it and you carry it around just weighing you down or it sits in the trunk commiserating with all the other forgotten wonders?


I usually convince myself, that some unusual picture will come along and I won't have the proper equipment to catch it.




One test is, don’t buy it right away. Go on another trip without the enticing object, and if you say to yourself, Hell, I could really have used the phneuah. Then, before you go out the door on your next adventure, go and buy one.


Another good test concerns reading the brochure that comes with the phneuah. If it is longer than your microwave manual, or seems like instructions for an alien vessel, forget it. You will NOT use it.



How about taking up space with a GPS?

Giverny was easy to find using the GPS, but I still had to use some tricks that I had learned inductively to get it to go the way I would choose using a map. Now, the GPS, no matter how large the learning curve, is worth every minute of research and concentration.

Once you get used to using it, you have great difficulty without it.




Cell phones, similarly, have myriad function, but many of us digital immigrants are using only about 1/100 of its possible tools.

We don’t miss what we don’t know about or don’t use. When I first got my cell phone, I was going to use for disasters only. As we live in Minnesota, one can think of quite a list of situations where you might need it in an emergency, go off the road, run out of gas, car doesn’t start because you left your lights on, flat tire, a monster has jumped on the roof – there are many scenarios.

But after I got the phone and got the family plan with my daughter in California, it would be easier if the cell phone came as an implant, my arms would sure appreciate it.

(BTW, I have tried any number of blue tooth hands free apparati but they make an even tinnier sound than the stupid cell phone and I yell because I don’t think the poor person on the other end will be able to hear me – which exacerbates the problem of tinniness and distortion.)





Laptops with WIFI are a God send, but also a scourge on humanity, huwomanity, and hukidity.


Once you get hooked on Google, email, Word, and Picasa, then you can move on to Skype, forcing you to invest in better and better webcams, microphones, speakers, video cards, sound cards, a need for USB hubs (more than one) and surge protectors.


Eventually you have produced a machine that looks like a spider, with legs and arms protruding at multiple degrees from their tiny sources, crisscrossing your real desktop and causing you to trip when you get up.

Zach and Ange just shake their head at both the impossible configuration I have on my real desktop and the clutter I have accumulated on my computer desktop.

Messiness is a sign of genius, I always say.



I could have used that laptop today, if I could have plugged it into the car.

Actually, I bought one of the pheuahs (an adapter for the car that allows you to plug in 110 AC fun objects), but I don’t know where I put it (another problem with too many gadgets.)

We nearly had a Klohs encounter with a group of fiend teens that we could have avoided had we seen on a map where the entrance was to our next destination – an ancient château in Gisors (or as Ted called Gizzards.)

There was a road block to the normal entrance to the monument, so we parked in a secluded part of town that had an old moat now made of weeds and grass that circled the place coming in the back way.

When I was told to GO ASK, I had questioned a respectable French woman passing by our parking place. Oh sure, she said, you can get to the chateau that way. It’s the long way, but it’s open.

Well, I don’t know the last time SHE had gone back there if EVER. I think she was just talking through her pantalons. After about a 100 meters, we found ourselves venturing down a grassy knoll. Every time I hear the term grassy knoll, I think of the assassination of JFK. We were sufficiently into the forest when we heard voices from up on a hill near by. There were about five or six teenagers who were “hiding” there, or at least out of sight of parents and town-folks. Clearly they had their reasons for their clandestine behavior, as they were enjoying weed, whiskey, and whooing.







Kids are like animals. They either see you as the alpha wolf and are like cubs, fun loving and endearing...









or They smell fear.


I wasn’t afraid (yet) and was not going to be if I could help it. I engaged them in a little dialogue as to the whereabouts of the entrance to the château. One slowly raised his head and pointed at the stairs that led up to a prison-type barred gate. He said tentatively but loud enough to be heard. “You can get in up there.”



Ted climbed the stairs.





He tried the large gated door. “It’s locked, chained and bolted.” He puffed.



When Ted reached the bottom, it was decision time. We could return to the car and find another way in, but that would mean going past the smoky ones again or we could keep going on the grassy knoll/moat and hope that it got to the pubic, unlocked entrance. We chose the latter (not the ladder, if there had been a ladder that would have solved the problem.) On the far side of the moat, we ran into another kid, who was too clean cut looking to be part of “the Group” yonder.

Monsieur (always a good idea to err on the side of politeness and respect), L’entrée qui n’est pas fermée à clef, c’est par là?”
Oui, Madame pas loin, après la fête foraine.
Hmmmm. Was there a circus in town? That must have been why they had cordoned off the normal approach to the site.

We started to hear voices and music. We made it around far enough coming across a banger, you know, where you have a large mallet and try to hit a spot hard enough to have the weight bang at the top. I guess I was traumatized by the moat trip and saw this kid with the mallet before I understood what he was really about to do. But then we ran into rides, bumper cars, an arcade, and families. It was the fête foraine. We stood there long enough to get a couple of bumper car shots, one of which is like totally bizarre where the Canon performed some mystery feats I have never seen before.




The kids were all in their cars, but some of them were decapitated - as was they guy running the ride. There were heads of people in the picture, but they belonged to other folks. I didn’t even think that you could perform such flukes with digital, but here it is to show you.







Finally, we made it to the entrance and took two pictures. Strangely, what had been a nearly full battery all of a sudden registered “dead’. So, all that way for two lousy shots, I was unhappy.

Ted turned the camera off and we looked around. There were two separate monuments, neither of which we tried to enter as they both looked locked, bolted and chained.







The sun was either descending or was trapped behind clouds that came and went. We stood by the wall that we had looked up at on the moat walk.


Just then, some of the smoky kids came through the public entrance. I don’t think they were following us, nor had any mal-intent.

But I told Ted it was time to pull up stakes and split.









Ted insisted that he could squeeze some more pictures out of the Rebel and turned him back on. He took a picture.

It worked.

It still said the battery was gone, but if Ted turned it off immediately, waited a bit, and then flipped it on again, Rebel was good to go for “one more “ picture. Between us, we took eight or ten shots of the buildings, and a couple of the Smokies.



The view of the town from the Château was quite spectacular, with a nice perspective on the neighboring cathedral, Hôtel de Ville, parks, and in the distance, our parking place. With the camera zoomed in, I could see the Grey Ghost, sitting quietly until our return She had been such a good car, unless you feed her the wrong kind of “food”. But that wasn’t her fault. If they made the Citroen C3 diesel for purchase in the US, I would buy one - 50 plus miles to the gallon, turns on a dime, and has European suspension and braking.

L’Esprit Gris would have to go off with someone else in just a day or so. I really got attached to her. I wonder how she is doing – she really needed an oil change. I hope they did her that service.




We left Gisors, and traveled back cross country, watching the hunters and their dogs in farmers’ fields.






I can’t imagine that someone didn’t get shot when they hunted so close to civilization and the freeway.



We watched clouds that dropped rain on neighboring towns, but not on us. There were clear skies and dark clouds, there was rain, and a patch of fog. Just like the morning, the skies couldn’t make up their minds how to fool the weather forecasters. It was a sunny, raining, cloudy, misty, clear day and provided much fodder for the XTI. Just then I spotted the one and only event that had been missing.




...a rainbow.


The rainbow was full and dramatic. It was so vivid that I could actually see where it went into the ground.

I tried to convince Ted to take a detour and find the pot of gold there, but the sun was quickly setting, and the spot continually changed locations as we drove along.

The really uncanny thing is that the Rebel now showed having a full battery and had no trouble taking in all the sites, activities and weather phenomena for the rest of our way home. Makes you wanna go hmmmmmm.


Tomorrow we go home. Nothing more to tell. What a Great Trip! Loved every minute of it.
Maybe we could stay for another month in France?

You have a picture from this trip dedicated to you on Picassa. Look for the group with the first letter of your last name. OR better still look at all of them, they are meant to be funny.
I hope you like them. See you on my next French trip!