Do You Know the Way to Monet's Gardens at Giverny?
The Grande Allée in Monet's Clos Normand. Giverny, France. September 2013 In Paris, the weather is anything but predictable, but you cannot wait around for a sunny day. So it was with umbrellas and raincoats that my husband and two friends left our apartments in the Marais neighborhood and descended into the Saint-Paul Métro station at seven that September morning. Destination: Giverny. Switching once at the Châtelet métro (but we prefer to switch at Concorde), we traveled to the regional train station, Gare Saint Lazare. There, we purchased roundtrip SNCF tickets on the Rouen-bound train. Before boarding, we validated our tickets in the yellow boxes on the platforms. If you don't validate, you'll have to pay the conductor a fine when he comes around to check tickets. After forty-minutes in our comfortable second class seats, we descended onto the platform at Vernon. Since there were four of us, we climbed into a taxi (instead of the buses) destined for the nearby village o...