Family Newsletter

August 15, 2001

Dear Loved Ones,

Well, Jeri and I rolled in from Paris yesterday, Tuesday the 14th, happy but pooped out. We’ve got jet lag so we’ve been sleeping a lot since returning. Actually I’m writing this letter at 2:30am and I feel like it’s 2:30pm.

Paris was wonderful. We must like it since we’ve been there two summers in a row. What makes it so easy for us there is that we have good friends with a large mid city apartment. It’s a ten minute walk from the Eiffel Tower and central to about everything in Paris. The subway system is excellent and even though we only know a minimum of words in French, it’s easy to get around.

Our friends there are Patrick and Geri O’Connell. Geri is an old Washington friend of Jeri’s…Patrick too. I officiated at their wedding 15 years ago. Geri worked for United Airlines for years and Patrick was a jet fighter pilot who got out of the Navy and became a businessman. He runs Raytheon operations in Paris that have to do with satellites and defense systems. Real space age and real high tech.

While there, Jeri and I bumped around our neighborhood, shopping and looking at the architecture, sitting at sidewalk cafes eating too many quiches and pastries and drinking too much cappuccino and café au lait. There was a beautiful park in our area called Ranelagh Parc where we spent time reading, napping and people watching (as good in Paris as it is in New York).

Of course we did touristy things too.

We did a walking tour of Maraih, one of the oldest areas of the city. Midieval houses, a 12th century monastery, old cathedrals and buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries. A wonderful side walk café. Jeri had salmon…I put away 12 snails. (escargot). Quaint shops.

We went to the Eiffel Tower again. It’s everything they say it is, an engineering wonder. We went to the Arc de Triumph. The Nazi’s drove through it…so did Lance Armstrong.

Jeri spent a half of one day in a large flea market which was actually begun in the middle ages.  She and Geri came back with bags of stuff.

We walked on the Champ Elysee and took a ride on the huge ferris wheel near the Louvre (Paris’s huge world class art museum).

One day Patrick drove us north up into the chateau country.  A chateau is huge mansion/castle/palace that the very wealthy used to build up into the 19th century.  We visited four of them. One was huge and austere…another was smaller but decorated and furnished beautifully…one was spectacular, built over a river with colorful gardens all around…the last one was built on a mountainside and it had two huge wine cellars down in its dungeon area. Leonardo d’ Vinci lived in it at the end of his life and is buried in one of the towers. We spent a lot of time in one of the wine cellars, tasting and buying. More fine local wines than you can imagine. Each vendor would dole it out. What an experience in a dungeon centuries old.

On one day Jeri and I took a train ride to the countryside to Giverny, the home of Claude Monet. What a place. To say that it is picturesque is a great understatement. A large but not too large country home with a kitchen to die for. A clear river, the Epte, running across the property. Tall elms and poplars. Monet spent much of his time in his gardens and at the lily pond, painting profusely.  At one point Jeri and I split up…I fell asleep on a bench under a weeping willow by the lily pond. I was awakened by a gentle rain and was virtually alone. The beauty of the scene is hard to describe. No wonder Monet was inspired so often.

And of course before we left the area we found a country restaurant where we spent a couple of hours very happily. The waitress named Iris was the best we met in France, and we met some good ones. The food? Wow!

We did many other things while there, but certainly one of the high-lights was at the end of our stay when we had dinner at La Tour d’Argent, one of Paris’s most famous restaurants. It is located right on the Seine River (pronounced Sin) overlooking Notre Dame Cathedral. Our meal lasted 4 hours and while there we met the owner, Claude Turrail. He took a liking to Jeri and Geri and had pictures taken with them. We were given free after-dinner drinks and a special guide took us on the roof of the restaurant to view Notre Dame and Paris at night. An unforgettable experience. 

So was the cost of the dinner. It is the custom to give out menus before the meal without any prices on them, except to the senior person in the group. With my whitish hair and wrinkles, they must have thought I was the senior person or the bill payer, so they gave me the menu with prices of the various orders. The others didn’t know that the prices were on my menu. As people ordered I never told them what things were costing, thinking they might be inhibited. I figured that it was a once in a lifetime experience so what the heck. It was one costly meal, but the food was delectable and the whole experience was out of sight.

We grabbed an Air France flight yesterday and now we’re back here again in the world’s greatest city. We’ll be here for a few days, then make our way to Puerto Rico for the rest of August. In Paris we kept moving. In Puerto Rico we plan to hang out on the beach, swim, read and generally chill out before we return to reality in September.

When we return to New York, Suzy, Cameron and maybe Larry plan to visit us for the Labor Day weekend. We are excited to see them.

Anyway, this is what we’ve been up to. While in Paris we thought about each of you, wishing that you could enjoy what we were enjoying. We miss each of you.

Love,