Tag: travel

Late Summer at Giverny
Hannah Wilson

Road Trip Day 1 – Giverny and Rouen

6 Comments Travel

My best friend Natalie and I decided to take a quick 4-day road trip through France, more specifically, Normandy.  What follows is an account of the events, sights, and stories that took place.  This is just part 1, you can read day 2 here and day 3 HERE.

Day 1 technically began with an extremely early wake-up alarm, a bus ride, lengthy walk to the car rental office, and subsequent loss of direction.  Somehow, we ended up on the wrong motorway about 20 minutes into the trip, but with a bit of spontaneous redirection, we were able to get back on track.  It seemed this first mishap would set the tone for the rest of the trip, as we became lost – without fail – every single time we turned the car engine on.  More on that later…

Our first real stop (if you don’t count a McDonald’s egg McMuffin pitstop), was Giverny!  It was my second time there, and it was just as beautiful as the first.  Last time, it was early spring, the garden overflowing with multicolored tulips.  This time around, it was late summer, so the greenery was much taller, much more overgrown, and the dominant flower was the Dahlia.  Dahlias as big as your head, no joke.  Here I have inserted Natalie’s hand for reference.

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Wandering Wednesday Parisian Street Photography
Hannah Wilson

Wandering Wednesdays

1 Comment Paris, Wandering

Long time, no post!  For the past two weeks I’ve been traveling around Paris and Normandy with my best friend, so I’ve pressed pause on the blog.  However, I’m back and ready to share my travels with you!  While I sort, edit, and write these new posts, I’ll leave you with another Wednesday wander through Parisian streets.  I should be back with a recap of our first road-trip day later this week!

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Hannah Wilson

Friends in Town: How to Spend a Day in Paris

1 Comment Paris, See & Do

It feels strange to say that this weekend, some friends from California were “in town,” as if Paris, with all its aura and majesty, is just a “town” that people casually enter and exit. I suppose it has kinda reached that status for me, it’s just the place I live now.

Nevertheless, I was super excited to show them around, and wanted to make sure they had the best, least gimmicky experience possible.  You can use this as a very rough itinerary for your own travel plans to Paris, because I think its a pretty good, non-overwhelming day.

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Hannah Wilson

Wandering Wednesdays: Latin Quarter & Hydrangeas

Comments Paris, Wandering

I’ve been trying to get myself out into Paris at least once a week lately, as the home-commute-work-commute-home routine gets old really fast, and I’ve succeeded so far.

First, I wandered around Beaubourg and stumbled upon AntiCafe, which you can read about in my previous post.  Great Success.

Then, on different day, I met a friend at Place Monge, indulged in a crepe the size of my head at Au P’tit Grec on rue Mouffetard, the interior of which is hung with vines, and then strolled through the surrounding streets while UBER-overindulging on a Nutella crepe for desert.

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Hannah Wilson

AntiCafé: A Fresh take on the Coffee Shop

Comments Paris, See & Do

One of my favourite things to do when I was at college in Long Beach, California, was to sit at a coffee shop for hours, either talking with a friend or studying.  I particularly loved Portfolio CoffeeHouse;  They used to have this old, heavy desk, full of drawers.  It was the perfect place to plop down with a stack of Art History and theory books from the library and write my research papers, which inevitably, were left until the last minute.  I was a good student.  :p

I’ve always felt like there was a serious lack of these kinds of places in Paris – communal living rooms where one can have a capp, nibble a scone, and relax.  Yes, Paris is rife with cafés, the kind of cafés with little round tables and rows of wicker chairs facing the street.  These are great, but they just don’t have the same purpose, vibe, or possibilities of a coffee house.

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Hannah Wilson

Wandering Wednesdays

1 Comment Paris, See & Do, Wandering

Did you know that in French, one walks in a street, and not on one? I think that’s quite poetic. To be in a street suggests that the road, the buildings, the trees, the people, are surrounding and enveloping you. You’re not just present in a place, but part of it.

If you couldn’t tell by the large title image, I’m starting a recurring series called Wandering Wednesdays. I can’t say that I’ll have pictures of miscellaneous Parisian street scenes every single week on Wednesdays, or that I’ll literally be doing the wandering specifically on Wednesdays, but it made for a good title, so I’m sticking with it! And when I do have some lovely pictures to post, I’ll post them on Wednesdays!

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