Driving around France

In May my mother came to visit and we made a giant road around France.

The weather was pretty decent the entire week, cloudy, sunny and a bit of rain. A lot warmer than what we left behind in Switzerland!

Our first stop was in Paris, now my fourth time visiting the city.
This time again it was to see all the major sights.

However, this time was my first visit to the catacombs. Underneath Paris are 300km of tunnels, originally underground quarries. These are the tunnels below Paris that you sometimes read about people exploring (and being lost) in. We visited a section that had been used for bone storage as they emptied the old cemeteries of Paris starting in the 18th century. They haven't been added to for almost a hundred years but they hold the bones of 6 million people.

I knew that the lineups were very long, so we showed up almost two hours in advance and were the first people to arrive. Because we were at the front of the line we signed up for a tour, received a holding position and got to sit in a park eating croissants for breakfast while we waited for the catacombs to open.

Our tour was one of the few tours led by workers at the catacomb monument, not just random tour groups allowed to go through. The entire tour was in French so Mic translated the interesting parts and lasted about 2 hours. These parts of the catacombs are sealed from the rest of the tunnels so you can't accidentally on purpose wander off (and die lost in the dark).

There were walls and walls of femurs, decorated with skulls.

And in behind these retaining walls of bones are piled all the rest of the skeletons

And the bones went on and on and on. It was very interesting and worthwhile to visit, although I don't know if I would be happy to stand in line for two hours if we hadn't paid a bit extra to go on our guided tour.

On our way out of Paris we stopped at Versaille. When we first arrived the line was huge so instead we went for a tour in the garden to look at Marie Antoinette's peasant village and the two Trianon palaces.

This time I saw when the fountains were turned on. Apparently it is difficult to get enough water to run the fountains all the time, even in the time when they were built they were only turned on occasionally, such as when the king went strolling in his garden.

When we went back to the line to get into the palace we had discovered that it had disappeared. Lucky us!
Inside was the large chapel.

And of all the rooms we passed, one room had the flooring removed so we could see what was below (it must have been under restoration).

And finally we were on the road again. The highway system in France was made in the 70's and they installed tolls to collect fees to pay for the highways. Of course, the tolls never went away after the system was paid and they are quite expensive (especially for the lower French salaries). We never had traffic jams on the highways and everything was in good condition. It was when we travelled between cities and didn't use the autoroutes that it became very obvious that French citizens used these roads much much more so, even though it could add hours to a trip. These roads were free to use and very crowded. They would pass through small towns and traffic was always slowed and busy. What a crappy crappy system for the French. At least in Switzerland you pay a single fee to use the highways for a year and the year fee cost us less than the first two days of French autoroute travel. Anyway, we took the autoroute to Laval to visit an aunt of Michael's for a few days.

While we were visiting Laval we went to see Mont Saint Michel (my second visit). It was fantastic to see from a distance and again we wandered up the medival town and wandered through the abbey.

Next on our giant road trip was to visit near Bordeaux, a chalet I had found online. We visited a nearby medieval town with its medieval clothes washing facilities.

The chalet was lovely and we had a nice dinner there in the evening.

After the chalet was a visit to the nearby tallest sand dunes in Europe, the Dune of Pilat. It slowly moves inlade and buries the large trees behind it (you can kind of see the trees in the photo, they look like bushes but they are quite large).
Now we have seen both the ocean at the north of France and at the west.

Again we were on the road, this time to stop at the medieval walled city of Carcassonne, of which I confess I learned about through the board game....
We parked nearby and walked up to the old town contained by the walls.

Inside, there were a few streets and all the buildings were tightly connected together. It was very touristic but we enjoyed some gelato anyway and admired the old town.

Finally we were on our way to the small small village of Brenas with Michael's parents for a big birthday party.

The weather started hot but quickly got chilly and wet, but the party was great.

After this, we finished our journey returning through Italy (and passing along the Azure Coast and by Monaco - thus seeing the sea to the south of France).