Inside the France to Italy tunnel

Because of a lack of Wi-fi access we haven’t been able to post for a while so we are catching up with these posts

We are starting this blog post from inside the very long tunnel between France and Italy. We travelled from Giverny/Vernon (Monet’s Garden) to Paris and are now on a high speed train to Torino.

Giverny and Monet’s Garden lived up to expectations as you can see from the photos.

The lily pond and bridge

View from the window of Monet’s house

Giverny is a small rural town that has a lot of day tourists for the gardens. Apart from the gardens there is a Museum of Impressionism which is well worth a visit. At the moment they have a retrospective of Maximillien Luce, an artist we hadn’t heard of before, but we really enjoyed his work.

On the first day we had lunch in a hotel restaurant and met three beaut Kiwi sheilas. I can already hear Karen, Donna & Denise giving me a hard time about that last sentence. They were sisters who happened to be staying in the same B&B with us. We had lots of laughs together and kept bumping into them all over Giverny and Vernon. Not sure who was stalking who.

Donna, Karen and Denise at Vernon station.

The B&B was lovely. Its name is La Pluie de Roses and it lived up to the name. Each room is decorated in a different rose pattern. It’s an old house from the beginning of the last century. Our hosts Phillipe and Elisabeth were very welcoming and we thoroughly enjoyed our stay. Breakfast in the conservatory was delightful. The garden was full of roses, some of them still in bloom and there was a pond full of frogs.

Our B&B

It was good to have a couple of quiet days after the packed days in Paris. We still did a lot of walking but we weren’t rushing to fill in the days. We went on one of the walks so that Claire could take a photo of the kangaroos and emus that she was sure she’d seen from the bus on the day we arrived. The kangaroos were hiding but she got a good shot of the emus. They were in a field with an ostrich, alpacas and some pigs, a strange combination.