Our stay at Hotel Apolonia Mouffetard was adequate. The location was very good and the small hotel was clean with a decent breakfast. The Mouffetard was one of the ancient roads leading into Paris, it intersects La Place de la Contrascarpe, a roundabout plaza with markets, cafes, bars and coffee shops.
The road itself remains untouched from earlier days in many ways with a narrow cobblestone street. It has always been a market and food area. On our previous stay in July at the nearby Les Dames de Pantheon Hotel, we strolled down the four blocks to pass through Contrascarpe and Mouffetard just to check it out. At that time the entire area was very quite unlike what I expected. We found out on our September visit why. The students had been away for the summer in July. They had returned and the area was very much alive and vibrant as we made our way to the hotel after being dropped off a couple of blocks away by our Uber driver. The plaza was full of students from the nearby Sorbonne University. The same would be true later as we returned from dinner a few blocks down the road and sat for a short nightcap, a Negroni for me.
We had a decent breakfast at the hotel, returned to our room, packed up and headed down to check out. I ordered an Uber to take us to the Avis office in the train station, Gare de Lyon, just across the river. The Uber app located a driver and had us walk a short block for the pick up. After waiting several minutes, our driver canceled without explanation so I had to order another which took another fifteen minutes to arrive. I had scheduled to pick up our rental car at 8:30 in order for us to make our way through the streets of Paris to our destination, Giverny, France the village where Maison et Jardins du Claude Monet was located. The driver dropped us off at the train station and we stepped inside to find the Avis with the aid of Google Maps.
This turned out to be a real disaster as we wandered in circles through the vast station searching, in vain for the office. There was no one to offer assistance and we became increasingly frustrated as the app led us in circles. Eventually we somehow located the office in the basement of the parking garage after spending one and a half hours pulling our bags around in circles to no avail. They had canceled our reservation because we were late and made us take a more expensive option. We found our rental and made our way out of the garage with more confusion and turned onto the streets of Paris to find our way out of town. I only hope we can find the entrance to the garage to return the car. With me at the wheel in a strange car and Janet navigating we made our way through the Paris version of the outer loop with a few wrong turn detours and were finally on our way out of Paris on the road to Giverny. Later that evening after dinner and several glasses of wine, I proposed a new motto for our travels. “It’s only fun if it ain’t easy”. Today was a perfect example of that, rough morning, nice day and a wonderful evening, and we had a good laugh.
We wound through the narrow streets of the village of Giverny to find a parking lot and walked up the narrow road to the Mansion Monet. I had prepaid for timed entrance so I was apprehensive because we were two hours late. No problem, the attendant smiled and scanned our passes on my phone and waved us through. Claude Monet, 1840-1926, was the father of Impressionism, a method of painting that produced his expression of what he sees unlike realism. He was a prolific painter all of his life, even as his vision failed. We walked through the randomly planted gardens, which were very different than the formal gardens of the French chateaus we would visit a few days later. The gardens and the lily pond, were the subject of much of his work and were a reflection of his art. The grounds were very busy and we stood in line for fifteen minutes to enter the mansion and file through the rooms, filled with reproductions of his and fellow artists works. The bright yellow dining room was beautiful but the Kitchen was the highlight of the tour with the blue tiled walls, large ranges and ovens and gleaming copper pots hanging from each wall.
Afterward, we made our way through the gardens to the lily pond through a short pedestrian tunnel to the lily pond area. Like the rest of the tour it was crowded and there were tour groups making access slightly difficult. The lily pond, lily pads and the blue walking bridge were familiar subjects of his paintings. When we were finished we stopped at a cafe on the grounds for drinks and cookies before searching with some difficulty to find our car. Like much of Monet’s work, the parking lots full of cars, recreational vehicles, bicycles vans was laid out in an impressionist style. We eventually found it and made our way through the streets for Giverny and nearby Vernon to find the highway to Honfleur.
Claude Monet was born in nearby Le Harve. Honfleur used to be the primary Atlantic port for the Seine River until the river silted over and Le Harve, which was closer to the Atlantic became the main port. The old port in downtown Honfleur is an iconic French seaport made famous not only for its beauty but also for the numerous paintings done my Monet under different daylight conditions. We were staying only half a block from the old port and walked over before sunset for drinks at an outdoor bar on the sunny side of the port. Afterward we strolled around to the other side and sat outside for dinner. Janet had a pizza with ham and pineapple and I ordered a bucket of Moules, mussels in the shell steamed in white wine and butter and served with a cheese and lardons, a thick bacon. Honfleur is truly a storybook setting. While having dinner a small swan swam nearby and the calm mirror like water in the port reflected the lighted cafes and shops across the harbor. We headed back to our room to rest up for tomorrow’s visit to the D-Day beaches and other sites before spending the night in Bayeux.
