We arrived back in Phoenix last night around 6:00pm. The pilot announced that it was 111 degrees as we were approaching the airport. What a shock after three weeks of temperatures in the 60s! <\/p>\n
It was a great trip. We met a lot of friendly and helpful French people, who don’t deserve their reputation of hostility towards Americans. If you approach them respectfully they will reciprocate likewise. <\/p>\n
Annecy in the foothills of the Alps was wonderful. Gisele and I are talking about going back there sometime and spending a few weeks, perhaps taking classes at a language institute. <\/p>\n
Normandy was very moving, and prompted me to read “The Longest Day”, about the D-Day invasion. There is a lot of history in the area, and plenty of museums to display it.<\/p>\n
The excesses of Versaille, the enormous estate built by Louis the 14th, helped me understand what pushed the French people to revolution a few years later. So much opulence while the people were starving in the streets. While there are still great inequities of wealth in the world, democracy tends to reduce the ability of a head of government to grab all the wealth for himself. <\/p>\n
With the excepting of having my phone picked from my pocket, the time in Paris was also pleasant. The mass transit system there is among the best in the world. You can generally catch a subway within a 5-minute walk of wherever you are and end up within 5 minutes of where you want to go. Of course, you may walk over 5 minutes within a station going from train to train. My main complaint about Paris is the size of the hotel rooms.<\/p>\n
Gisele would probably go back to France every year, but there are too many other places in the world I haven’t seen, or would like to see again, so I don’t expect this to become an annual pilgrimage for me. But I’ll be glad to go again some year, but let me get over jet lag first. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We arrived back in Phoenix last night around 6:00pm. The pilot announced that it was 111 degrees as we were approaching the airport. What a shock after three weeks of temperatures in the 60s! It was a great trip. We met a lot of friendly and helpful French people, who don’t deserve their reputation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-updates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=632"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/632\/revisions\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}