Welcome!

Toulouse's main square

 Hi faithful fans* of travel journals!  Just letting everyone know what to expect -

This blog is actually a travel journal of our guided trip (Odysseys Unlimited) around the west and north of France, and Paris, which we took in May of 2024.  The reason there is an extensive travel journal is threefold.

First, it's a way of keeping connected with family while we're away; I send each day's post by e-mail to family members who requested it.  Second, it's a way to remember the trip; in two or five or ten years we can look back and relive the good parts.  Third, I like to write.  Yeah, I know.  Weird.

On the ship, cruising around Japan last year, there were hours and hours - sometimes whole days - of free time to read and write.  This trip is a lot different, of course.  We're doing something every day, all day, and even when we have "on your own" time it's in a fascinating city that is worth exploring for days, instead of the afternoon or so that we have.  So - I'll write what I can in the evening - I do want a record to look back on, and I want to keep y'all in the loop, but some days may be pretty sparse.  The good news is, unlike last year, we have reliable internet every night, so we can send off posts on a regular basis.

Important note:  Photos can be embiggened by clicking on them.

The flight(s) were pretty miserable and we could write a long chapter just on what went wrong – but we won't.  Actually, the flights were pretty nominal (i.e.: unpleasant coffin rides), but Charles DeGaulle Airport outside Paris, where we changed planes, was a nightmare.  It's a big, awkward, disorganized, unpleasant airport in the best of times, but the Olympic Games are beginning in Paris in late July, and they're working on (at an apparently leisurely pace) getting ready.  Looked like too little too late to us.  And then - as I write this in early July - it seems that the airport workers have called a strike the day before the Games begin.  

But nothing vital went wrong and we did get to our hotel in Toulouse with with everything we left Boston with.  We met Caroline, our guide, outside the Toulouse airport and I was able to relax for the first time in days.

The Ta Da Chair

One thing that went right:  no problem at all taking my Ta Da Chair with me onto the plane.  As soon as I said it was a cane, the response was "But of course!"  This reminds me of taking my grandmother to Expo 67 in Montreal.  She was 82, and in pretty good shape (she lived to 99), but she never would have made it around the world's fair on foot.  We got her a wheelchair, and we got to skip the line at every exhibit.  She though it was the bees' knees.  

I bought and brought the cane/chair because I having more and more trouble standing in one spot for any length of time without a lot of back pain.  Since there was liable to be a lot of standing (museums, town tours, etc.) it seemed like a good solution.  It worked great (although it worked a lot better if I could lean on a wall while sitting), and the cane allowed me to get some weight off my legs while walking, which helped a good deal.

Another good thing about the flight (BOS-CDG) were the plane cams, one on the top front of the tail, and one underneath in the front.  They were cool for takeoff and landing and taxing, although there was nothing to see while we were in the air.

A third good thing about the flight was that we were in an Airbus, not  Boeing.  All doors remained closed and attached to the plane.

Once we got to our hotel, collapsed and slept for a few hours, we still had some time before our group meeting and dinner.  We followed directions and, after missing it once or twice, found the ATM and got some local currency - euros (most of which we changed back the day we returned!).  Then off to see the church that had been circled on the map for us, and that we could see the spire of from the main square in town, which was only a few yards from our hotel.

We're real suckers for a good Romanesque or Gothic church or cathedral, those singing, soaring anthems in stone and stained glass.  They took hundreds of years to build - only the last generation of artisans got to actually see the completed masterpiece - and they are still here, eight or nine hundred, a thousand years later.  They are conceptually awesome and artistically satisfying.

It had been many years (2018?) since we had been in a medieval church and we were psyched.  This one was the Romanesque Basilique Saint-Sernin de Toulouse.  A church on this spot, of the same name, received some holy relics from Charlemagne in the eighth century, and so it became an important stop on a pilgrim's journey to the path of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, of which we will hear more anon. Tolouse was right on a major pilgrim path to Santiago.  Believe it or not, regular and comprehensive records of church construction were often not kept or updated, so our best guess is that this church is about 900 years old.  And that's when it was finished.  And it's still used as a church.

I mean, have you ever been around something that is nine hundred years old?  The weight of history is tangible; I was here, in this place, and the medieval world slowly emerged and flowed around me.** This church was built by people who had never heard of Gothic architecture, because it hadn't been invented yet.  There are relics of one hundred and twenty eight (!) saints as well as a thorn that believers say was from Jesus' crown of thorns.***  They were displayed in the catacombs, below the nave, each in a splendid reliquary, each more elaborate and fantastical than the last.  There they were:  who knows what was really in them, but each was designed and crafted by artisans who believed they were unbearably holy objects, and Charlemagne probably handled at least some of them.  And there I was:  I got to be there.

A Reliquary

NOTES:

* - For newcomers:  I have been putting together blogs made up mostly of travel journals, one blog per trip (like this one), for a while now, and I have been sharing them with family members who asked to be included.  The journals are mostly written on the trip, and I've had some luck in regard to keeping up-to-date on them.  We e-mail posts out to our readers during the trip, and then I put together the blog - usually with added material - a month or two after we get back.

Most recently, we went to Japan, and this giant blog was the result.

Thanks for being with us!

** - Whitsun has suggested that VR systems could be available to visitors, so you could be in the medieval world as you entered the church.  Wouldn't that be something!

*** - Emperor Charlemagne, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Franks, etc., etc., was apparently a relic guy.  In "A Traveler's Guide to the Middle Ages," Anthony Bale describes the church he built in Aachen, on the German/Belgian border, as containing "...important and intimate relics of Christ and the Virgin.  These were the swaddling, a folded trapezium of brown felt, of the infant Jesus; the loincloth, a greying rag, worn by Jesus during the Crucifixion; the 'decapitation cloth', a piece of damask said to have held the head of John the Baptist; and, most precious and famous of all, the tunic, a dun pocketless smock, worn by the Virgin Mary on the night of the Nativity."  Bale tells us that in July of 1496 alone, 142,000 pilgrims entered Aachen.