She's Ba-ack!

That's right--back on home ground. It really doesn't feel as if I had a trip to France--it was more like 4 trips!



We saw Notre Dame de Paris from a bateau-mouche on the Seine, at twilight...
We saw a Russian cathedral in Nice...
We stood on a headland in the Mediterranean Sea, at the Villa Kerylos on the French Riviera...




We saw the Statue of Liberty in Paris. Did you know there are three of them, plus the full-size torch on the Pont d'Alma? (Which was not put up as a memorial to Princess Diana, although many people seem to think it was.) This one is person-sized; there is a smaller one in a park, and the smallest is in a museum, along with the sketches and plans for the "big" one in New York.


See, travel does make you learn new things.
We ate French food--this is a Salade Deux Palmiers, from the "Two Palms" restaurant in Nice. Mmmmm! We ate there so often that when our waiter found out it was our last night there, he gave us each a snifter of Chartreuse as a good-bye!
We saw beautiful flowers everywhere. In Nice. In Provence. In Paris. These are in a little flower shop along the Left Bank (Rive Gauche).
Yes, there was knitting. This is the Paris scarf, which had its own adventures. The pattern was lost on the flight over--luckily, it's an easy repeat. The needles--Bryspuns, ideal for flying since they're not metal--snapped. Luckily it only took an hour and a half to get it repaired, once a new needle was procured--not as easy a task as you'd imagine.


No, I did not spend the time "yarn crawling." There was some fabric shopping--how can you go to Souleiado, and the Toile de Jouy museum, and the home studio of a fabulous dye artist (in the Languedoc-Roussilon, yet!) without coming home with fabric? I saw some yarn but it was all comparable to what's available here.


I mean, after Black Sheep Knittery, what's left??
It was a wonderful, fabulous trip. It took the stamina of a triathlete (which I'm not) but it was well worth it. I've uploaded over 1600 photos to Flickr and now I'm busy organizing and captioning them. After all, you can't tell the rocks apart without a caption! For anyone who's interested, you can check that out as I will be posting only a few of the photos here.

And the Grandcarrot had his first birthday, with a pirate party, and a chocolate cupcake, and a wonderful time was had by all!

(And my CPH stayed home, and I'm dead last in the competition. Oh well. One can't have everything!)