Traveling with Ellen

Some last looks at Paris on the way to the train  Half of our time here in France came to an end this morning.  We put our luggage outside our room at 6 am and went back to sleep for a while. After breakfast, we played cribbage for about an hour and left the ship at 10:30 am.  We were taken by bus to the train station and a group of 24 of us were taken to our train car and settled in to our seats by Viking.   It was one of the fast trains and I clocked the speed at over 175 mph for most of the ride.  Two hours later we were in Lyon and met on the train platform by Viking staff, and taken to our waiting bus for the short ride to the ship.  The entire process was handled very well by the Viking staff. We boarded the ship at about 4 pm, unpacked and went to the lounge for the obligatory safety talk.  Dinner was good, it was meeting new people again as only 24 transferred from our first ship to this second ship. Tomorrow we have a tour of Lyon that leaves ...

We are just outside of Paris docked at Le Pecq as it is close to our first tour, Chateau de Malmaison, the home of Josephine and Napoleon Bonaparte. The weather today is perfect, about 70 degrees and sunny.  We left the ship at 9:40 am for a 2 hour tour of the house and we also had access to the gardens but little was in bloom .  However the driveway entrance to the house had some beautiful tulips and annual flowers in bloom.  Bettiann took a longer walk to find the black swan and did finally find one. We had a great house tour to see how Josephine, originally from Martinique bought the house and made it into the home she wanted.  Napoleon also lived there when he wasn’t off conquering countries.  He never had a child by Josephine.  She had a son and a daughter by her first “evil” husband who died in jail during the revolution.  He was executed.  Josephine also went to prison solely because she was married to the first husband and later was  ...