Monday, August 17, 2009
Which way to Chartres?
We missed our train Sunday morning to Paris, so we spent the next two hours in the hot waiting area charging my phone. We reserved a car with Hertz so that we could drive around the outside of Paris. For those of you who may not know, my dad is a Chef who studied in Chartres, France. While here I figured it would be pretty neat if we could stop by and have dinner. Instead of getting an expensive hotel room we decided to rent a car and sleep in the car that night. So up to this point everything had gone to plan, we got a cute little car and thanks to the directions on my phone we got to Chartres in record time.
The town is by far one of the cutest towns I've seen with lots of little cafes and stores. The Notre Dame de Chartres is the reason that the town is even on the map.
When we drove into the town it almost looked as if the cathedral was floating on the hill tops. Before dinner we walked around the town and listened to a violinist in the cathedral. For anyone visiting Chartres keep in mind that parking is super difficult! Later that night we went to the restaurant, where I had the best dinner of the trip. It's a four star restaurant so you can just imagine how good it was, especially after eating Gouda cheese and salami for the past two weeks. We started out with appetizers (a crab spring roll and shrimp with chilly), dinner (lamb shank and Penni pasta), followed by dessert (tiramisu and a raspberry thing). Ok so I'm not very good at their French names but it was pretty DELICIOUS!! After a million pictures and a few glasses of wine we decided to high tail it out of there and find a place to park the car and sleep. By this I mean we decided to try and drive to Giverny but we got so irritated with the directions on my phone because France can't name a road one name so we pulled over to sleep it off. Eighty steps for an hour drive, seriously! Luckily for us we found a parking area that was free with a nice large bathroom (hmmm, I mean tree). To our surprise the car was much more comfortable then the tent. We slept so well that we didn't realize how late it was when we got up. Ok so now back on the road! Oops, did I mention my phone was about five minutes from running out of battery life and was the only map we were using for directions! For some reason no stores outside of Paris sell maps. So there I am writing down 80 steps of how to get to Giverny. With the help of our trusty Carrefour (the Walmart of Europe), we were set for the day, breakfast and lunch done. Our hour drive from Chartres to Giverny would take like three hours. The phone was dead, we were lost and a this point guessing which direction to go in. For some reason, we let our noses lead us and guess where we ended! Right exactly where we wanted to go, imagine that, not even a map!!!!!
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