Paris Journal: Kew Gardens remembered through notes & photographs

Victoria Gate to Kew Gardens

June 20, 2017

By Moristotle

[I was, of course, remiss not to include this account here shortly after our return from Paris after June 2017. I publish it today because today a couple of my friends are visiting Kew Gardens!
    And, in case you’re wondering what a visit to Kew Gardens has to do with this Paris journal, please be reminded that Carolyn and I took a four-day side trip to the British Isles last year to visit our Welsh friend Penelope Griffiths, who writes our column “Penny for Her Thoughts.”]

For our visit to Kew Gardens today, we were out of our hotel for about seven hours, catching the 65 bus [near the Hotel Xanadu in Ealing] toward Kingston at around 9:30 a.m.

Paris Journal: Side trip to Wales

Welcome to Caerdydd (Welsh for Cardiff)

By Moristotle

On Saturday, June 17, the Paris metro stations were relatively deserted for our 6 a.m. departure from Mark’s apartment. We were off to take a train from Gare Du Nord to the port city of Calais, to be met there by our friend Penelope Griffiths, who had driven over from Cardiff, Wales to meet us and take us back on a ferry across the English Channel so we could see the White Cliffs of Dover.

By way of apology to the wild birds in our neighborhood

Written towards the end of May, just in case

By Moristotle

Besides missing Siegfried, who will be kenneled for the month of June, a sadness of being away from home, mostly in Paris, is the knowledge that our neighborhood’s wild birds will find no seeds in our back yard all that time. They won’t even find their favorite feeders. I took the favorite feeders down this morning to stage the photograph shown above. Though it may look inviting enough to you, I who delight in seeing & hearing birds there, find it a desolate spectacle.