24 Christmas Memories – 22

It’s Day 22 and I’m coming to you a little later than anticipated… but the days are marching on.

Today I’m going to share the last couple of memories shared together with my mom during her stay with us before her return to Canada.

Is this first Christmas Memory post you’re seeing?
You can get caught up by starting back on day 1 to understand this year’s theme

Chambord

On the way back from Belgium & Germany we stopped for a walk around the Château de Chambord.

Regular readers of the blog will know that it’s a frequent stop when we have visitors, because it’s only about 10min off the main highway linking Chatellerault to Paris… so it’s an easy in & out. We typically don’t visit the inside of the castle on those stops – that would take significantly more time than is implied by “quick in and out”. If you want to read more about Chambord, I’ve shared A Walk around Chambord, and shown the inside of Chambord but otherwise just know that it was built by King François 1st as a hunting lodge, and he never spent more than 2 weeks here. 😳

Paris

It wasn’t but a few days later, that mom & I headed up to Paris just the two of us. We drove up early one morning so that we could visit the city a little bit before her flight back to Canada the following day.

This is a picture of her in the courtyard of the Palais Royal, and in front of Notre-Dame. If you look closely, you can still see the tip of the spire between the two bell-towers. This was, of course, before the devastating fire that saw the entire roof burn.

We had a delicious hot chocolate on Île St.Louis, and a nice meal at The Nemours café not far from the Louvre. It wasn’t an excessively strenuous day and then we headed to our airport hotel so that she could be well rested for a long travel day the next day.

We said our goodbyes at Charles-de-Gaulle, then I went back into the city to drown my sorrows so to speak… specifically… to the bee yard at the Jardins du Luxembourg (it was winter and there was little activity which is why I was able to get so close to the hives). I love this park, with it’s espaliered fruit-tree orchard and bee yard.

Saying goodbye was difficult (being far away is still difficult… 9 years later) but I’m ever so thankful for lovely memories of time together on this side of the Atlantic.