We'll always have Paris

Last week, we took the Eurostar under the Chunnel to meet my folks for a few days in Paris. (I also took the opportunity to meet some remote co-workers at the Amazon.fr office.) We had a wonderful time, and finally managed to edit most of the footage down to the following four segments:

Bus Tour

One thing that's worth doing in any big city is hopping onto one of those open-top buses and getting a quick introduction to what all's available, where things are in relation to each other, and what looks interesting enough to merit a closer visit on foot. The following is set to the credits score from the Bourne trilogy, which featured many a high-speed chase through the streets of Paris:

Be Our Guest

This is kind of a parody of all the pictures (and slides...endless slides!) that my Dad used to bring home from my parents' trips to Europe, in which my Mom nearly always happened to be snacking on some local delicacy. Since Paris is synonymous with grossfine cuisine, it seemed appropiate to document some of the highlights as we chewed our way across the capital:

Eiffel Tower

Well, you can hardly come to town and not visit this emblematic icon. Although we walked by and under it enroute to other stops, we didn't go up the elevator until our final morning in the city, before dragging our luggage back to the Gare du Nord. Note that, while it is fairly straightforward going up the tower, there are two elevators coming back down; the one we took terminates about halfway down, leaving you to navigate the stairs for the rest!

Lourve

We allocated one full day to exploring the famous musée of Paris, dutifully stopping to verify all the plot twists in Dan Brown's factually-challenged bestseller:

Of course, there is so much more to be said about Paris, and France and Europe in general, but that'll have to wait for another time :-)

A Poke in the Eye

My parents arranged to meet a few of their college buddies from Capital over in Europe for a reunion tour, so got to spend a few days with us at the beginning and end of the trip. One thing we got to do was finally take a ride up into that big wheeley-thing that decorates the Thames pier:

Lyme Regis

DailyMotion allows me to use my original audio track, but the video quality is rather poor, even with "HQ" enabled:

Conversely, YouTube forced me to change the audiotrack (still processing, as the current version is silent), but clearly provides the best video quality:



I suppose that if this is the worst I have to complain about, I should count myself pretty fortunate :-)

Stonehenge

The kids got two weeks off from school for the Easter holidays, and we decided that we'd been "playing it safe" (keeping close to Maidenhead and it's immediate rail-accessible environs) long enough, so decided to strike out into the verdant verge for a 4day camping trip along England's "Jurassic Coast", down around Lyme Regis on the southern Atlantic coastline.

There are a lot of interesting points to visit between Berkshire and Dorset, but one that had long topped our hitlist was Stonehenge. A lot of the locals here shrug, "but it's just a bunch of rocks," typically to go on about how Avebury is both larger and less commercialized, if you go in for that sort of thing.

But that's not it at all. Stonehenge is more than a pile of rocks: it's a center of myth, legend, and folklore dating to before the time of wallpaper screensavers and forwarded emails with 3MB attachments showing precariously perched kittens and dancing babies. It's the primordial lodestone, a keynode of ley lines whose ferric poles pull at our cultural consciousness. Not to even get started about Seekers, Aspirants, Ovates, and your new-agey Hierophants!

"And their legacy remains...hewn, into the living rock of Stonehenge."

Oxford

Saturday dawned bright and beautiful, so we thought it would be a good day to finally take the train up to Oxford. I take trains running "to" Oxford just about every day (I come home each evening on the Paddington-to-Oxford line), but typically get off after one or two stops.

We packed our usual rucksack of sandwiches and snacks, then headed up for the great explore:

Winding through Windsor

Pete & Judy on a leisurely tour through the Queen's weekend villa...

Walking through Westminster

For the record, I firmly protest Mark's choice in music for this one! By the way, you can read more about the Buxton Memorial on Wikipedia.

London Zoo

This was shot by my Dad when he and my Mom took Jonathan into Regent's Park to see the London Zoo. Videophiles will be glad to see that I'm trying some better encoding options when exporting from iMovie :-)