Sweet Andrew's PANORAMA-RAMA!

Do click and scan; the resolution is amazing! If you click on "Gigapan" in the lower righthand corner, it will take you to a full-screen version.

Bamburgh Castle from the dunes



Stirling Castle




Kelso (Scotland)



Durham Cathedral on a Summer Evening



Eiffel Tower and a bridge over the river Seine



Beach on the Soloway River



The Louvre

Golden Anniversary

Our last day in Scotland, we celebrated Barbara and Richard's 50th wedding anniversary (the primary reason for our trip). The entire family came, including Barbara's sister Allison and her husband Tom, their children Chris and Catherine, Catherine's husband Dave, and their children Katrina and Little Andrew.

The gang's all here!

Katrina

Little Andrew

The happy couple

Dave

Catherine, Chris, and Andrew

Catherine

Allison

Tom

After dinner, we went home for cake, conversation, and entertainment provided by the kids, who were happily dressing up in anything they could find and hosting guessing games and raffles for the adults. (Note to self: I think this family rigs contests so that when the Americans come to visit and buy inordinate amounts of raffle tickets, they still don't win. Another note to self: this really is a gentler, kinder way to do things, silly American girl. :)







Allison had made an absolutely gorgeous cake (and Barbara had made me an egg-free batch of her famous "gunge", which was just as decadent). Afterwards, we launched a couple of sky lanterns to commemorate the occasion. It was a very memorable night!

It tasted even better than it looked (yes, I snuck a bit!)

The big kids prep the sky lantern.

Woo hoo! It's starting to fill!
Up it goes!
Look a UFO!

A walk through the woods

On our last day in Paris, we took the metro to Le Bois de Boulogne, a remnant of a larger forest that has a long history. Now, it is a large recreation area in the Western part of Paris.

Who's the biggest goofball of them all?

Lone pigeon on the way to the Metro.

Yes, France needs more large mattresses. I can vouch for it.


France has homeless people too.

Gregory hams it up in the Metro.


Cute Andrew on the train

Rowboats in a row at the lake in Bois de Boulogne

Not sure what's up with this tree. Perhaps Dr. Seuss disease?

Beverley and Andrew

Andrew, hair mussed

Gregory and Uncle Andrew

The trees have eyes here.

Another eye

And another

More eyes

A dead bunny. I know, it's a touch morbid, but I thought it was beautiful.

Some sights of Paris

We arrived in Paris late at night and, after a brief meal at a café, collapsed in the Hotel Ampere, which was quite comfortable. We awoke the next morning and walked a couple of miles through Central Paris to the L'Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel tower. We stopped at a small grocery for drinks and a patisserie to get a pastry in honor of my mom's birthday.

Mom's birthday figue (fig)

A street fountain, with the women dressed in knitted dresses and scarves.

Barbara and Beverley


Gregory, Mr. Tough Guy

I had expected to find the L'Arc de Triomphe boring, but it was far from it. I think part of the reason I expected it to be small and not particularly marvelous is that I have seen it in pictures so many times, surrounded by what looked like a little roundabout and a few cars. Well, for those of you who haven't seen it, here's the deal: the roundabout is HUGE and SCARY (I would never ever ever want to drive in it and no pedestrians cross it aboveground) and the buildings around the monument are all six stories high. L'Arc de Triomphe itself is simply massive, which is all the more impressive when you consider when it was built. The carvings on it are quite lovely as well. I'm glad to have seen it on the first day, before I become acclimated to the scale of everything in Central Paris, which feels most like Manhattan of all the places I have previously been, except that the buildings are so much older and the city is cleaner and less scary.

On the way to the Eiffel tower, we happened across a vertical garden built by Patrick Blanc. I was so thrilled because I have been researching these online for months and hadn't even considered looking for one here. This one covered the entire face of a four-story building and supported thousands of plants, probably year round. The entire structure is held about four inches away from the building's original face by brackets. Over some wood or resin are layered alternating layers of plastic, a nylon fiber, rip-stop mesh, and more fiber. Water containing nutrients is dribbled from the top, seeps through the fibrous layers, in which the plants have rooted, and then water is gathered in a channel at the bottom and recycled through. It's a remarkably simple system to create such a beautiful wall--all without an ounce of soil!

This is how it's mounted. Look how thin it is!

We decided not to climb up the Eiffel tower because the queue was more than an hour, but we hung out underneath for quite a while, taking pictures and just ogling. Again, it's difficult to imagine the scale of the thing unless you're actually there; it's breathtaking.

Um, Gregory, it's a little more to the right...

Andrew sets up a panorama of the bridge leading to the tower.

See the guy climbing it on the right? Maintenance? Stunt man?

Left to right: Erika, Gregory, Andrew, Beverley. Behind us: the Eiffel Tower.

Then we hopped on a sightseeing boat (click here for separate post) that went along the Seine, around Ile de la Cité, giving us a great view of Notre Dame. After that, it was off to dinner!


Crepes!