photos – Monsieur Miller

Joyeux 14 juillet! It’s la fête nationale in France today, what we call Bastille Day in English. Turns out nobody calls it that in France. French Today blog has a great run-down of vocabulary and customs for Le 14 juillet, I recommend it.

(It’s also the 108th anniversary of the birth of American folk-singer Woody Guthrie. Happy birthday, Woody!)

Covid-19 has has disrupted the 2020 celebration of quatorze juillet this year, but not as much as I would have expected. France’s daily Covid-19 totals nationwide are down to 800 new cases / 30 new deaths, and are largely having success at re-opening their society. In Paris, they are going ahead with an all-day concert on Champs-de-Mars, a military ceremony on Place de la Concorde, an ariel parade over Chaps Élysée, and midnight fireworks. There are more restrictions than usual on people gathering to view these events, but the Champs-de-Mars concert is definitely open to the public. Sortir à Paris has a full guide of Fête Nationale 2020 events.

My oldest daughter and I were in Paris on 14 juillet 2013, sampling a lot of venues:

We attended a nearby Bals des Pompiers at midnight 13-14 juillet, viewed the morning military parade on the Champs Élysée, went to a movie near Opéra in the afternoon, then took a boat cruise on the Seine at night, watching the fireworks from near Pont de l’Alma

Here’s some of what we saw seven years ago.

A 14 Juillet midnight tradition: Bals des Pompiers. We watched from the outside, didn’t make it into the dance hall.

We watched the défilé militaire from the sidewalk, near the George V metro stop. First there was an aerial display, a parade in the sky of sorts, complete with un drapeau français.

Next came a mechanized parade. First police and fire vehicles…

… and then military vehicles:

After that, a final return to the air:

We took the afternoon off, then went on a bateau-mouche at night to watch the fireworks from the water.

Feux d’artifice, 14 juillet 2013 à Paris.

At the time, I had mixed feelings about the military parade in Paris. On the one hand, it seemed totally authentic, patriotic, clean, and stereotypically French. On the other hand, I imagined the analogous event in Washington, D. C., on July 4th and didn’t like the image at all. Of course, it didn’t take too many years before imagination became reality. I was right: I was not a fan of the July 4, 2019 military parade in D. C.

Maybe some French traditions are best left to the French…

Google Photos introduced a new feature that allows you to see on a map where the photos in your library were taken. This turns out to be an expressive travelogue summary for me. Since nearly all my photos after 2008 are in my Google Photos library, I can see where I’ve been. Here’s the section of the map for France:

That’s a lot of places to have photographed! It breaks down into a few different trips.

Paris and environs (2013-2020)

I worked in Paris for a summer in 2013, and went back a few times since, most recently with my family over New Years 2019-2020.

You can see there’s some coverage outside of Paris. The spots to the northeast are Charles de Gaulle airport. The spot to the northwest is Conflans Sainte-Honorine, where we had lunch in 2013 at the friend of a cousin. West-southwest is the Palace of Versailles, of course. The spot east of Paris is Bois de Vincennes and the château there, tourist destinations both. The nearer spot to the southeast, just outside Melun, is the Château de Vaux le Vicomte. It’s a tourist site, and one of my favorite – like Versailles but way less crowded, more human scale. Finally, the far southeast spot is Samois-sur-Seine, near Fontainebleau. A co-worker lived there (commuted to Paris every day!), and hosted a summer party for the office once.

Tours (2014)

There’s a small spot on my France photomap just to the east of Tours. In 2014 I worked in Paris for a couple of weeks, took a weekend tour of the Loire valley Chateaux. I confess, it was quite challenging booking the tour on the phone (in French), and trying to comprehend as they told me that the tour started in Tours, and it was my responsibility to take a train from Paris to Tours and get to Tours by 10am to meet the tour. The brochure didn’t mention the meeting site somehow, only said it was a Loire valley tour from Paris, so the existence of a city named Tours was nowhere on my radar. It all worked out though, it was a nice tour, and Tours was nice too.

Dijon and Beaune (2017)

In 2017, I had a work trip that took me to Zurich, Switzerland. I took the occasion to tack on a few days of vacation in Dijon, France, which is only a few hours away by train. It so happens the my wife’s cousin is a French professor at a college, and runs a student exchange program with a college in Dijon. He has spent many months there over the years, and so was able to connect me to his network of friends there. I had a great time getting to know these friends, seeing Dijon, and getting a VIP tour of the wine-producing region of Beaune. It was a short visit, but wonderful.

Roye, Compiègne, Amiens (2018)

In 2018, my daughter and I did a homestay immersion program in Roye, a small town in Somme, about 120 km north of Paris. We studied with our host / teacher each morning, but spent the afternoons being tourists with or without our host. We toured the cathedral in Amiens, the château in Pierrefonds, the palace of Compiègne, and the World War I battlefields around Albert. I took a solo visit to the museum on the site where the November 11 Armistice was signed in 1918. They were busy preparing for their centennial, but the museum was already chock full of photos and artifacts. Overall, the trip was outstanding.

Nantes, Bordeaux, St. Emilion (2020)

A map of Bordeaux and St. Émilion with highlighting to indicate where I took 322 photos in January 2020. — Loire and Atlantic

After welcoming the arrival of 2020 in Paris with my family, I bade them goodbye at the airport on January 2nd and began a 4-day solo road trip. My eventual destination was Aurignac, a small village southwest of Toulouse where I planned to spend a week. But before that, I enjoyed un petit périple down the Atlantic coast. I rented a car, drove the highways listening to French talk radio, stopped at rest areas often. I spent a night and a morning in Nantes on my own, a half-day in Les Sables-d’Olonne with my French teacher’s family, a night and a morning in Bordeaux. From there I hopped over to St. Emilion for a 24-hour stay including a winery tour, a gourmet dinner, and a luxurious stay at the Château Hôtel Spa Grand Barrail – a bargain and a splurge at the same time. I left after breakfast and drove south, arriving in the afternoon at…

Haute-Garonne: Benque (2020)

A map of Aurignac and surrounding areas with highlighting to indicate where I took 477 photos in January 2020.

I enjoyed my 2018 homestay immersion program in Somme so much that I arranged to do a second one in January 2020. I spent a week in the tiny village of Benque (population 162), which is outside Boussan (pop. 213), which is outside Aurignac (pop. 1,200), which is the site of a famous cave. The nearest big city is Toulouse, about 75 km northeast. I had a great time studying and living with my host family, baking bread at a neighboring farm, making lemon tarts in the village shop with the local pastry baker, and rambling the countryside. Beautiful, quiet landscape, my first extended solo vacation in decades.

Carcassonne, Narbonne, Avignon (2020)

A map of southeast France with areas around Carcassonne, Narbonne, Sète, Avignon, and Marseille highlighted to indicate where I took 64 photos in January 2020.

The vagaries of airline pricing meant it was cheaper to fly home from Marseille than from the much closer Toulouse. So I did one final day of long distance driving at the end of my homestay in Benque, ending up at the Marseille airport hotel shortly after nightfall. To break up the drive, and to get in some sightseeing, I stopped in Carcassonne, Narbonne, Sète (outside Montpellier), and Avignon. While in Benque I ordered online a number of books that my host recommended, and arranged for them to be delivered to a FNAC in Narbonne. Separately, I met a board game designer in Aurignac and enjoyed playing one of his games with him. I researched game store locations and visited three that fell along my path to Marseille. It was a fun way to have a reason to visit smaller French cities for 45 minutes at a stretch.

Marseille (202x ?)

I didn’t see much in Marseille beyond the inside of the hotel and the inside of the airport. I slept at the airport hotel following my 10 hour driving day, caught an early flight in the morning. But I should like to go back sometime and visit it properly.

Ah, going back. As of this writing (July 2020), Europe has imposed a ban on travelers from countries with high level of COVID-19 infection, including the United States. When I first thought up the title of this blog post, I meant “My last 4000 French photos” as in “my most recent photos”. But given the way things are going, it’s hard not to worry that these could in fact be the last ones I ever take. That would be make me very sad…

Tag: photos

La Fête Nationale, now and then

My last 4000 French photos