Gray Pari!

, originally uploaded by Let Ideas Compete.

J and I took a short vacation to France this past week. We stayed in Paris for two gray days and then took a train to Orleans where a friend of a friend picked us up by car. J has an old friend, actaully a priest that used to be the campus priest at her college, who has a house in the small town of Saint Benoit in the south Loire valley. St. Benoit's population is 1200 and it's the home of the Benedictine monks. WE were able to take day trips to nearby cities like Sully Chateaunef, Bourges, and Gien. This part of France is agricultural but it is very quaint and rustic. It is not the spectacular French alps or the Pyrennes.

This trip only made me want to visit France again...perhaps Provence.

It is noteworthy that we not even once experienced any rudeness from any of the French. Based on stories I've heard, I expected complet rudeness. Instead we experienced very friendly and polite people.

There are plenty of pictures on Flickr - enough to bore anybody - but check out some of them.....

We did have a few days of nice blue skies but mostly we saw gray. The trees were bare and pruned down to stubs. The vines and flowers were dormant. We can only imagine the spring and summer must be beautiful (except for all those pesky tourists). I have a suspicion that France would collapse without the tourists, though.