It was another very busy day – our group checked out of the Hotel Splendide in Lugano at 7:15am so we could be driven to Tremezzo, Italy for a private boat tour of Lake Como so we could see the glorious villas, and then we had an hour to explore Bellagio before returning to the coach for the two-hour drive to Milan, allowing us to check into the Grand Rosa Hotel in Milan and gobble down a very quick lunch before taking a Milan City Tour beginning at the Duomo (a five-minute walk from the hotel) and continuing with a visit to Castelo Sforezesco, a look at Santa Maria delle Grazie church, and ending with a fifteen-minute visit to The Last Supper (which hangs, as it has for centuries, in the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery, now the Cenacolo Vinciano museum. And then we had our tour orientation lecture and joined our new friends Derek and Sue for a delicious osso buco risotto dinner at Valentino Legend Restaurant (including “The Apple of Sin” for dessert). whew!

Herewith a few photos from the day.

Lake Como

Bellagio

The Duomo

Castelo Sforzseco

Santa Maria delle Grazie church

The Last Supper

The Apple of Sin (yummy!)

Tomorrow, we have Nothing Scheduled (though we have hopes of doing a La Scala tour). It will be lovely.

May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year!

Lake Lugano was beautiful this morning from our room!

We spent most of the day touring the Verzasca Valley and the city of Ascona, both in Upper Ticino. The captions on the photos will have to speak for themselves.

After the tour, we had a little time for a funicular trip to the top of Monte San Salvatore to enjoy the view and visit the church at the top of the mountain.

And now we’re back at the hotel, preparing for a very early departure tomorrow. Ciao!

Phase 1 of our European adventure ended today with a flight from Paris to Milan, where we were whisked to Lugano, Switzerland for a three-day/two-night mini-tour. Getting to and through CDG was none of the fun (buying “Speedy Boarding” on EasyJet helped a lot with the checkin and security lines), but the flight itself was perfectly acceptable.

Our local guide, Roberta, met us at the airport; there are eight of us taking the mini-tour, and the others had arrived directly from the US earlier in the day and were resting. :-)

We took a walk along the waterfront before meeting the rest of the group for a guided walk along the waterfront; here are some photos from the walks.

After the walks, we returned to the hotel for a welcome drink and snack before splitting up and going our separate ways for dinner. Diane and I had a light meal at the hotel bar; it was quite pleasant.

I’m glad we stayed in for dinner, because the weather turned very wet and windy while we were eating.

We didn’t have plans for this morning, so we decided to go out to Père Lachaise Cemetery, a half-hour away by Metro. I thought we’d probably see Jim Morrison’s grave, but I was hoping to find other memorials of interest, and I did.

We began with Gertrude Stein (and added our own pebbles to the ones on her grave).

About a hundred meters away, we saw some large and impressive monuments. It turns out that they were monuments to the victims of the Nazis – Jews, Resistance fighters, and others. Here are just a few.

A little farther down the path, we saw several gravesites of members of the French Communist Party’s Central Committee, as well as one for Maurice Auden, a mathematician, communist, and Algerian freedom fighter who was tortured to death by the French army.

We did eventually visit Jim Morrison’s grave. We were not alone, unlike the other memorials we’d visited.

We left the cemetery and had lunch at Bistrot Pere, which had quite a few Sengalese dishes on their menu. I had the Yassa chicken and Diane had the Thieb chicken – both were yummy. So were the desserts, which were more typically French (chocolate mousse and Speculoos cheesecake).

We hopped onto the Metro to go to the Etoile to join our afternoon tour to Giverny and Monet’s gardens – we nearly didn’t make it! There was a problem on the system and instead of being in each station for one minute, our train was there for three or four minutes each time. We got off one station early and walked the rest of the way (three blocks), arriving in time for the one-hour ride to Giverny.

We began the tour with a trip to Giverny cemetery to pay our respects to Monet; we saw a few other interesting memorials there, too.

Seven British airmen crashed in Giverny on the night after D-Day and are buried in the cemetery there.

Monet and his family are buried in the cemetery, too.

And then it was on to Monet’s gardens (and house). The gardens were absolutely beautiful; I took far too many photos to share.

We started in the Water Lilies Garden.

And then we went to the Flower Gardens (Monet described them as “his third child”), with a brief detour to Monet’s house.

Monet painted the same scene over and over to experience and show it with different light; we went back to the Water Lily Garden one more time to do the same thing with photography.

One last stop in the Flower Garden, and then we were on our way back to Paris for the rest of the evening.

We’ve made several trips to Paris, so we didn’t feel the need to meticulously plan out every attraction and every minute of the trip; we thought it’d be more fun to be spontaneous. And it has been, as yesterday’s post proves (if you follow my blog from Facebook, you missed yesterday’s post – Facebook deleted the link I posted there, claiming “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way”!)

But today, spontaneity had its price: more than an hour in line waiting to get into Museé de la Orangerie while people with reserved time slots whizzed past us. We were lucky, though – rain was in the forecast, but we only felt a little light drizzle while we waited.

Once we got through the line, we had plenty of time to see the entire museum. We spent a good part of that time contemplating Monet’s Les Nymphéas (Water Lillies), along with hundreds of new friends (only a few of whom were standing in front of the paintings while posing for Instagram). I took a few photos myself, but it’s really hard to take a good picture of the huge canvasses; the iPhone’s panorama function helps, but only so much.

We had lunch at the museum’s cafe – it wouldn’t have been my first choice, but leaving the museum was out of the question! Again, planning ahead would have helped….

After lunch, we explored the Heinz Berggruen exhibition; Berggruen was an art collector who had to flee Germany in 1936 because he was Jewish. He was in the US Army during the war and became an American citizen soon afterwards, but moved to Paris and opened a gallery specializing in modern art before eventually returning to Germany and opening the Berggruen Museum in Berlin, stocking it with his personal collection (he described himself as his own “best customer”), some of which was on exhibit at L’Orangerie. There was a lot of Picasso and Klee in the exhibit, like this portrait of George Braque (otherwise known as “Homme du Chapeau”) by Picasso.

I enjoyed the permanent collection (the Walter-Guillaume collection) more than the Berggruen exhibition. I especially liked the Utrillo paintings depicting Montmartre, like this one of Èglise Saint-Pierre, one of the churches we visited yesterday.

I also was taken by Utrillo’s “La Maison Bernot”, even though we didn’t see that building (and I don’t know if it still exists).

We made one more visit to the water lilies before leaving the museum; our timing was good, because it had rained pretty hard while we were inside, but there was just a little mist on our walk back to our Airbnb. The views from and of the Tuileries Gardens were, as usual, very nice; I was glad we were there while the landscaping in honor of the Olympics and Paralympics was still on display.

We returned to the apartment and noticed people working at the Louis Vuitton offices next door. A few people were on computers, of course, but most of the people we saw were sewing (or maybe designing).

We walked over to the local Westfield shopping center (Les Halles) so I could buy a Magsafe external battery for my phone. It was drizzling as we walked over, but absolutely pouring when we were ready to leave; the weather app said that the rain would end within the hour, so we spent the time looking for a place to have dinner. We’d passed Au Chien Qui Fume (The Smoking Dog) a couple of times and their menu and reviews were promising, so once the rain stopped, we walked over and had a delicious (and probably far too caloric) dinner.

Then it was back to the apartment to charge my new battery, and off again for another evening walk along the Seine, passing Èglise Saint-German L’Auxerrois on our way there.

And now we’re back in the apartment. There was a loud peal of thunder as I sat down to write this post, and lots of rain to accompany it – but it seems to have stopped for now. And so shall I.