Chairs

I’m feeling a little better again today, and with our neighbours’ building work now entering its fifth month, and promising to break new records for noise today, I’m going to get out and about and get some jobs done.

What does this mean for you? A quota photo of some chairs in a church.

The church in question was the cathedral in Auxerre and the chairs… well… they were those ones above.

I liked the light here and the orderly geometry of the chairs. And this was only a tiny percentage of the huge number of chairs in there. Empty this day, but I’ve heard that they get big crowds on Sundays.

Some more France photos

I’ve gone through more photos from our trip, selected some, edited them and posted them onto Flickr.

The latest batch is here, and they’ve joined the previous stuff in this album.

This latest lot details the final couple of days on the Canal du Nivernais and River Yonne, from Bailly to Migennes via the prettiness of Auxerre.

This night time view of the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne d’Auxerre taken from the historic footbridge didn’t come out quite as I expected. For me, there’s a bit too much soft light on the building, but its position against the night sky together with its dark roof gives it an ethereal, otherworldly feel, so I’m happy enough.

Still lots of holiday photos to get through.

I can just sense your delight. Even from 6000 miles… away.

Soon

I’ve finally got started on editing some holiday photos.
Well, I say that. What I’ve actually done is to upload some of them (the first 8GB) to my laptop.

It’s something.

So I have randomly selected this one – taken in Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris – to illustrate the fact that I’m all over this photo stuff like a particularly aggressive moss.

Looking at the first lot of pictures, there are an awful lot of of images taken inside churches. But then, there were an awful lot of amazing churches. And you don’t have to be religious to appreciate the architecture and beauty of these places of worship.

Because of its location and size, Notre Dame is obviously well known and much visited, but we found equally breathtaking churches (if not quite to the same scale) in much smaller places like Auxerre, Clamecy and Châtel-Censoir. More of those later, but it’s worth noting that in many places, they would be huge tourist draws in their own right, yet they sit quietly and humbly with no signage, no pre-recorded audio guides, no nothing.

And I found that the experience of visiting them was better for that.

Popping in

Well, hello.

I’ve been having the same problem logging into the back of the blog as I had last time we were over in Europe. That’s why I haven’t been in touch.

Plus we’ve been busy drinking wine.

Fortunately, the good news is that this was an intermittent problem, and this is one of those times that things are working, so I’m diving in.

The canal trip is going well. We’ve just moored up in Auxerre: the biggest place we’ve been to since we left Paris. It’s been a very leisurely trip down the canal, mooring up wherever we feel like overnight and stopping off for lunch or dinner on any appropriate bank.

The boat has been great, the people have been friendly, my French has been surprisingly good, the wine has flowed freely.

There’s a city to explore now, so please excuse me…

I’ll check in again when and if I can.

Thanks for reading.