Night Arc

A nasty rainy day on Sunday left us two boys inside and restless, Mama gone for the week. We put our heads together and came up with the idea to go into Paris and climb to the top of the Arc de Triumph. And so after and afternoon nap, off we went. We arrived a little sunset, and so we were blessed with a beautiful night view of the city of lights. I was blessed with a massive calf workout. Once we made it to te top, we watched cars circling below, we saw the Eiffel Tower lit up and sparkling on the hour, and we gathered our bearings on yet another birdseye view of the city (have also seen Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower, top of Morntparnasse, and the steps of Sacre Coeur; Montparnasse is the best, but the Arc de Triumph is right there with it). A beautiful view of a beautiful city.
Sawyer was really great on our way up the tower, riding in my arms and laughing as we passed a group of girls in heels trying to climb it. On the way back down, he got a little restless and wanted to walk it (he's recently learned to jump off of things and thus looooves going down steps). I fought with him most of the way, but once I could see the end of the stairs I let him down and assumed (correctly) that he couldn't walk any slower than the British couple in front of us. As we rounded the corner and finished the final steps, the exit door worker's eyes widened with a look of "did that two-year old really just walk down the 481 steps from the top?" Sawyer held his head high and grinned.

Knowing a 40-minute train ride awaited myself and a restless boy, I came up with a great idea to get a McFlurry from the nearby McDonald's. He and I could share it and thus occupy our time on the ride. My plan backfired. It turned out that Sawyer had no interest in eating the McFlurry. Not even a bit. He did, however, take great delight in attempting to feed me spoonfulls of the M&M laced ice-cream. Uh-huh-huh Daddyo, the tables are turned! And so he proceeded to dip the little plastic spoon into the cup and barely coat it in ice-cream, then hold it up to my mouth and giggle with delight. Even the sourest faces on the train around us couldn't help but laugh at our scene.

So the Champs-Élysées is the major road in front of the Arc de Triumph. It's kind of a big deal. Among other things, it's littered with a bunch of crazy high-priced fancy jewelry stores. Brands like Cartier, Swarovski, and Swatch hawk their wares on the Champs, but seeing a billboard in the metro, I have a new favorite brand:
That's right... Free Willy artistic jewelry and decorative items. Who wouldn't want a house full of Free Willy?
Free Willy!

Loire - Villandry

On our way home from the Loire Valley, we stopped at one last Château: Villandry. Villandry is most well-known for its gardens, and thus we never made it inside the dwelling, but rather spent our morning roaming the pathways and trails of the gardens outside.

The gardens were quite impressive. And we came in the middle of autumn. Imagine them splashed with color and flowers as they would be in spring and summer!



Beautiful and useful, these gardens were filled with vegetables like cabbage, peppers, celery, artichokes, and pumpkins. Mmm, tasty garden!

Hey, grapes! Perhaps intended for wine, but pretty tasty themselves.

One of our favorite parts was the labyrinth, a maze of pathways between hedges ending in the middle with a wooden tower and a view as the reward! We picked our paths and raced to the middle. Mama won, with Sawyer a close 2nd.


Au revoir jardins de Villandry!

Where is your church?

When someone asks, "Where is your church?" we point them to a building or give them an address, and everything centers around what happens at that location.

When we gather at the building, we learn to be good. Being good is defined by what we avoid in the world. We are holy because of what we don't participate in (and at this point we may be the only organization in the world defining success by what we don't do). We live decent lives in decent homes with decent jobs and decent families as decent citizens. We are decent church members with little more impact on the world that we had before we were saved.

-David Platt, Radical

Sound familiar?

What if when we listened to a sermon, instead of wondering what we can get out of it, we listened to it so that we could go and teach it to someone(s) else? Someone who is waiting, hungry, expecting. What would that kind of a church look like?

Loire - Ussé and Chinon

After leaving caveman land, we made a childhood dream of JJ's come true and drove to Sleeping Beauty's Castle. The real one. More or less. Château d'Ussé is the real building on which the castle in the story of Sleeping Beauty was based (as written by Charles Perrault). Seeing it from the road was indeed impressive and stunning. Because of both vocal and written reports that the interior was in bad shape and not very accommodating to guests, we didn't go in. Sawyer did find a fun tree to play under by the road though.

Next we continued on to Chinon. Chinon is a fun little town in the Loire which is overlooked by an old castle. We arrived during market day and had a good (though cold) taste of French open-air markets outside the city. Here JJ and my mom are shopping for scarves.
After our shopping ended and we rested a bit, we went for a visit of the Château de Chinon, an old castle with a rich history. It was a lot of fun to walk through, with towers, dungeons, and state rooms abounding. But this château/castle had some added fun in that it was recently renovated and reopened. Instead of simple plaques detailing history or funny-looking scaled models of people, battles, pieces of equipment... throughout the chateau were videos transmitted onto walls, fireplaces, and ceilings which showed some of the history. Things like visits of kings, requests for aide from Joan of Arc, and midnight battles came to life inside. For a slightly less-than-overly-interested history buff (read: don't care much about history) like myself, this was a fantastic idea! I recommend it, if you're ever in Chinon.