Day 52: The Louvre and Home

Our last day in Paris.  Truly it was all over too soon.  There seemed so much more to see and do; so much on my list that we barely touched.
So we’d best be up early, there was a lot to fit into today before we had to be at the airport this evening to start our long journey back home.
We’d packed last night so we were able to get out of the apartment by 8:30 or so.  It was all too hard to arrange a taxi in Paris.  Everything I’d read said booking a taxi could leave you open to having to pay for the taxi from their departure point, something that could turn out expensive if they taxi was coming in from the suburbs.  The best way to grab a taxi is from one of the taxi ranks, however much searching of the internet the night before was reasonably inconclusive in respect to locating one nearby with any confidence.  There was one somewhere on Blvd de Clichy, so we’d see if we could see it, but basically if we’d walked that far with our luggage, we were already nearly halfway to Gare du Nord anyway.
In fact the hardest trial was not worrying about a taxi or walking to the station, but rather getting the luggage down the apartment stairs without killing myself.  The steps showed every bit of their 400 years of wear and they were steep.
It had rained overnight so the streets were wet as we walked through Montmartre to Gare du Nord station, past the shops just opening up for the day, and the early risers heading about their business.
We walked along Blvd de Clichy with no taxi to be seen, past the metro station, and then continued along Rue de Dunkerque towards Gare du Nord.
At the station we were able to drop off our bags with no problems at all, thank God, and we grabbed a simple breakfast at station café.
A lot of people come and ask for money in Paris.  A lot of them do not look like beggars either, such as the lady that was asking all the clients while we ate our croissant and drank coffee.
We caught the metro to the Louvre, passing a beautiful violinist as we made our way out from the station and up to the Passage Richelieu.

Day 51: Musèe de l'Orangerie, Notre Dame and sad farewells

Shanny, Shazzy and Ken were already waiting for us at Café des Deux Moulins, otherwise known as Amèlie’s Café.

Day 50: Versailles and Offenbach

And today we go to Versailles.
Versailles: Loius XIV, XV and XVI’s monument to excess and decadence.  No wonder the people revolted. Luckily the palace survived the revolution, as I’m sure it is a great money spinner now for the French. Just like Ludwig’s tributes to the Sun King back in Bavaria are huge tourist attractions.
We met Shaz, Shan and Ken at Abbesses and metro’d our way, with a little bit of getting lost between line changes for just that little bit of added excitement, to our RER station at Musèe d’Orsay.

Day 49: Montmartre

I was up early, and decided to go for an exploratory walk around Montmartre while Michelle slept in.
There were still quite a few people in the Place du Tertre, even at this early hour.  I needed to get a map, however the tourist office wouldn’t open till 10:00am so I wandered around the mostly deserted streets, heading in the general direction of Sacré Cœur.

Day 48: Au revoir Rome, ciao Paris. Saving the best till last

Our last day in Rome.
It is always a little sad as I leave one place I have quickly grown to love, and yet of course exciting to think that I’ll soon be somewhere new.
Today we basically had a spare day free of any planned activities since the juggling from the closed Colosseum meant that we had missed going to Naples and Pompeii.  Naples couldn’t have been an option today as there was no chance we would be back in time to make our evening flight to Paris.  So today was an opportunity to sleep in and just take it easy. And today we did just that.
After our 10:00AM checkout, we headed off to Termini station to drop off our luggage. Seven weeks we’d travelled through Europe without any address tags on our luggage, but now I was feeling that my luck had run out, and I had best find some before we left our luggage in the left luggage.
There are a lot of shops at Termini.  Two levels of shops.  The lower level included a McDonalds alongside part of the old Servian wall.  I just love finding these old city walls, and this one is from the 4^th Century BC.  History plus.
But continuing on the search for luggage tags; most shops if they even understood what I was asking for did not have the damn things.  Not even the sure bet bag shop.  There was even a full on supermarket down here where at least I found a combination luggage lock so we could lock up the hand luggage, but alas no tags.
In the end I gave up and checked our bags in tagless and headed back upstairs.  I bought our tickets for the airport train ride this evening, despite those pesky “ticket helpers”, and then headed off down the streets of Rome looking for somewhere to plonk and relax.  The simple prerequisites being drinks and shade.
We sat down at a nearby restaurant but after 10 minutes without service, gave up and moved on. We decided to walk to Trevi Fountain again, especially as I hadn’t yet tossed my obligatory coins in. Half way there, wouldn’t you know it, we came across another fountain.  Rome is the city of fountains.

Day 47: Vatican City

Today is Vatican Day.  You know, because more Roman Catholicism.  Anyway, it’s not realistic to visit Rome and not visit the Vatican. Our tickets were for 9:30, and I’d organised the train tickets the night before so we headed straight down to the metro station about 8:00.  That should be heaps of time.
There are only two train lines in the underground in Rome, so it’s pretty straightforward getting around on the train, except this was peak hour and the platform was crazily crowded.  We had to let the first train go, and managed to just squeeze onto the second.  I’d never seen anything like it, except maybe in those videos of trains in Japan where they have people to push the commuters onto the carriages.  The platform and train were literally packed solid with people.

Day 44: Florence for one more day. Palazzo Pitti.

Last day in Florence today.  It’s always amazing how after just a few days you feel at home in a place, comfortable walking around without getting lost.  Such a sharp contrast to when you first step out of the train station or airport into a new city and you can’t even work out which way is north.

Markets were setting up in the streets, and the Ponte Vecchio was crowded even at this early hour.

The Palazzo Pitti, however seemed thankfully quiet, and no queues at all at the ticket office.  Tickets in hand; you need two tickets for this one, one for the palace, and another for the garden.  The garden ticket also gets you into the costume gallery, back inside the palace.  Yeah, I don’t get it either apart from it cost 23 euro all up.

Anyway, this is one pretty amazing gallery, and takes quite a while to get through.  We spent about 3 hours and covered all the art gallery, but I was suffering pretty severe gallery fatigue for the last 5 or so rooms.  I re-entered one of the rooms, and even though I’d only been in it 5 minutes beforehand, I couldn’t remember a single painting on the wall.  My head was full of Tuscan and Florentine art and I couldn’t fit any more in, it was coming back out of my ears. Still, it was all amazing and on a longer stay in Florence a couple days between galleries would solve this problem.

So I got my fix full of Botticelli, Lippi, Raphael, Van Dyke, and even some Rubens.  No pics allowed, I found out after taking a picture of the ceiling.  Which didn't turn out....

Day 41: Italy just gets better and better - Florence!

We met Paolo at our apartment at 7:30AM for checkout.  Our train was at 8:30, and it was about a ten minute walk, but I like to be early and not risk missing a connection.  There were no hassles with checkout, so we were soon lugging our luggage down the three flights of stairs, and dragging it all up to the train station.

They had a really cheap and nice café shop at the station, which was great after having to pay upwards of 5 euro for coffee!  And they had café ginseng!  For 1.50!!

Day 40: Totally Love Venice!

Today was Michelle’s birthday.  What a perfect place to spend a birthday! After getting the train into Venezia Santa Lucia, we saw the Orient Express awaiting departure at the platform.  That train looks like a must do experience, but when I looked it up online afterwards, it only travelled from Venice to Paris.  Not sure why it's still called the Orient Express anymore?

Day 39: By lunchtime we'll be in Venice

A commute day today.  Boring.  Well not too boring.  I mean I could be sitting at home, or working…
Germany is a very scenic country to drive through.  From Salzburg, the countryside slowly changed from the mountains, to verdant green countryside.
Within not much more than 2 hours we’d dropped off the car and were at the airport.  Very early.  I prefer to be early at airports, but this was very early. And airports aren’t the cheapest of places to eat either.  Anyway, they had my favourite weisswurst so I took advantage of my last chance to have this, and also grabbed a nice huge weissbeer, even though it was about 9 in the morning.  I wasn’t the only one either.

Day 33: Die Zugspitze

It was absolutely the best weather today, so today would be superb for Zugspitzing.
So we were up nice and early to get the 8:30 train, but still we just missed it.  Probably didn’t help going to the wrong station, but hey.  We grabbed a coffee and caught the next train up through the beautiful scenery of green grass fields, villages of painted houses and kids riding their bikes to school through the town streets and bike paths all framed with a beautiful snow covered mountain backdrop.

Everybody wants a photo of the blue train

Day 14: From Gatwick to Barcelona

Today was our last day in London.  Sad face :-( Today we had to say goodbye to Shanny.  Huge sad face :-( :’(
Shaz, Mich and I walked along the Thames to London Bridge Station and had breakfast under the Shard while we waited for Ken to join us.  Sliders for breakfast is OK, yes?  Actually it was 12, so technically it was lunch, and Pimm’s O’Clock!  I got my first Pimm’s and it was really delicious.  Into Dan Murphy’s again when I get home :-)

Day 13: Nipple biting snakes, labyrinthine mazes, glorious gardens - Hampton Court

Today we were very privileged to not only have Shanny all to ourselves, but also to have Shanny as our very own private tour guide for Hampton Court, where she would be sharing her love of all things Tudors with us.

Day 12: Urinal Games, college pranks and dog's seeing ghosts

London’s damn Tube strike was still on. So for our trip to Cambridge we caught a double-decker bus to Waterloo.  As luck would have it, the northern line was still operational so we could tube it quickly to King’s Cross Station.
I grabbed our tickets and within minutes we were on the Cambridge Express, and almost as quickly, getting off the train at Cambridge less than an hour later.  Too easy!

We walked downhill into town and after a quick wander around, grabbed a pretty decent burger at Ta Bouche for lunch.  Now, I wouldn’t normally share any toilet experiences, but the loos downstairs at Ta Bouche were certainly a little novel, at least in my experiences to date.  You see, the urinals all had screens above them, and little sensors in the urinal to allow you to control a game with, well…
Read about it here on Wikipedia

Europe Day 7: Edinburgh

Today was an early start.  I like the early starts.  I’m getting up around 6 in the morning anyway, and getting out and about early means that so much more can be seen and done in a day.
Today we were off to Edinburgh with Shanny, Shaz and Ken.  Ken was again playing tour guide, a role he takes on with great enthusiasm and passion.
Rather than catching the tube, it was decided to take a black cab to King’s Cross Station, since there would be the 4 of us travelling today.  Shan had to work today, so would be travelling up tonight.

Europe Day 3: London

Michelle and I were up early to try and get some internet time in.  The internet at Shaz and Ken’s is pretty much broken, so we thought we’d head down to Starbucks.  Luckily they weren't open and we went to Caffe Paridiso, on Shad Thames for breakfast instead.  Shaz and Ken joined us a bit later, and after we finished coffees and breakfast we caught the tube to Hampstead.

Europe Day 2: London

This morning we walked downriver and mud larked again with the low tide. Though there was much less to find at this point of the river, we still managed to pick up a couple of broken smoking pipes and pieces of old crockery.

Cairns Road Trip Day 7 Kuranda and a Barron Fall

 Safely reunited with my family the night before, we headed up the skyrail, across tall rainforests to the township of Kuranda.

 In Kuranda, we toured the rainforestation nature park and the markets and stalls of Kuranda, where Liam scored an authntic boomerang.
 after lunch at the Kuranda Train Station, we took the scenic Kuranda rail back down to Cairns

Hue what a lovely place

We woke early with the train still rocking along. We passed through some lovely green countryside, at times quite close to the mountains. We went through a number of tunnels, some of which had caves with stalactites visible as we rumbled through!. We stopped at a few stations where people madly tried to sell fruits and food through the train windows and we crossed a number of lovely rivers where we could see lift nets used to catch shrimps.

Michelle and Liam had struggled through the night to use the pit toilet at the end of train, trying desperately not to slip and fall into the hole as the train rocked back and forth only to later find out that the other end of the train had a normal Western style toilet!

Breakfast was a choice of pork bun or BBQ beef instant noodles, which was quite tasty. The instant noodles were very spicy.

We arrived in Hue shortly after 10:30 and it was hot! We took a taxi to the Festival Hue Hotel, and settled into our room. We had a nice lunch at the hotel by the pool; crab and mushroom soup for Michelle and I, and Liam had French Fries with mayonnaise as he didn't like his vegetable soup; though we found it quite delicious.

Liam had a quick dip in the pool before we went for our boat trip on the Perfume River. The boats looked great all lined up at the side of the river, with a flock of ducklings swimming in between them. We met the lovely mother and daughter who were our captains and cooks.

The river cruise was beautiful. Heading up the river we could see people dredging sand and pebbles from the river bottom, their heavily laden boats barely above the water as they traveled back to drop off their load of sand at the shore to collect a hard earned 100,000VND per boat load.

We continued up river to Minh Mangs Mausoleum, which featured the most magnificent gardens and lakes. We walked through some beautiful temples and courtyards and could see the hillside in which Minh Mang is reported to be buried.

Water Buffalo were playing in the water as we returned to the boat and made our way to Thien Mu Pagoda. It was starting to get a little dark, and a light rain was falling as we had a quick look around the complex. Michelle was starting to feel a little seedy, an omen for things to come. The pagoda was very peaceful with the Buddhist monks all sitting down for their dinner.

Michelle was starting to feel worse, so We returned to the dock where Michelle caught a taxi back to the hotel. The boat returned to the middle of the river where it dropped anchor near the Hue Citadel and Liam and I sat down to the most delicious feast of fish, pork, beef, chips, water spinach and peanuts and rice. It was indescribably magnificent as the boat floated gently in the middle of the river with the lights of Hue as a backdrop.