Travel Blogging VI

Dateline: Vernon, France. We are getting nearer Paris; I’m told people live here and commute daily to jobs in Paris by train. Our river ship is tied up in Vernon, which is very near Giverny, home of famous impressionist painter Monet. We got on a bus and hardly had time to get settled in before we pulled into the parking lot for Giverny.

Monet had developed two quite elaborate gardens, one a water garden with lotus and somewhat in an Asian style, the other in very rectangular European layout. Both had lots of flowers and other attractive plants. The other DrC took many, many photos of these blooms, at least some of which will soon appear on her blog at http://cruztalking.blogspot.com.

The Monet home is adjacent and available to tour. This home is preutilities, and has a magnificent wood stove in the kitchen. The kitchen sink has a drain but probably drains into the garden. On the other hand, it does have radiators, probably installed later to keep it warm for tourists. I suppose they used chamber pots and emptied them into the garden as fertilizer.

As I walked into Vernon to find a wi-fi spot by the city hall, known locally as the “hotel de ville,” I thought about the experience of living in a museum: a town of ancient homes. What must it feel like to live in quarters that have been serially inhabited for centuries by strangers or by your relatives going back many generations?

Life here is a very different business than the life I live in WY and CA where my two homes are 10 and 23 years old respectively, and I had both of them built to my designs. Someday someone else will live in those homes and wonder about me, whereas I am the first occupant of both.

I feel fortunate to have lived, with the other DrC, in five new homes, only two of which we now own. It is odd to drive by homes we once owned and see how they have changed, how they no longer look as they did when we lived there.