NORMANDY BRITTANY & CHATEAUX COUNTRY - 2010

9 days incl. travel, or 8 days from Paris to Paris (RC)

Return to France Vacations

Vacation Overview

This vacation is the perfect way to see the highlights of Paris as well as the World War II landing beaches in Normandy, Brittany, and the Loire Valley. Begin in Paris with a welcome dinner and guided sightseeing that includes the highlights, including a bird’s-eye view of the city from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower. Via Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned in 1431, continue to Caen for an overnight. Then, travel to Normandy, where World War II comes alive at the Memorial Museum for Peace, the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach, and at Sainte Mère Eglise with its poignant parachute memorial. Next up: Mont St. Michel, a scenic drive across Brittany to the 13th-century castle at Angers, and the Loire Valley for a special included “châteaux day.” Visit the jewel of the French Renaissance, Château Chambord; Catherine de Medici’s lovely Chenonceaux; and Clos Lucé to admire Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions. Time to explore gothic Chartres Cathedral before returning to Paris for the end of your French holiday!

Things to see on your vacation: View Vacation Photo Slideshow

A Vacation Story Eiffel Tower

Imagining Paris without the Eiffel Tower is like London without Big Ben or San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. But no sooner had the architect Gustav Eiffel beaten his 700 competitors in the design competition for the 1889 Centennial Exposition, celebrating a century since the French Revolution, than a vocal outcry began to halt construction of the edifice. Three hundred famous French artists and writers signed a petition in the newspaper “Le Temps” denouncing Eiffel’s radically modern design as “useless and monstrous,” a blight upon the elegant fabric of the City of Light. Others critics were even more vicious, describing the proposed tower as a “tragic street lamp,” a gymnasium apparatus…incomplete, confused and deformed,” “a giant ungainly skeleton,” “a half-built factory pipe,” “a carcass” and even “a hole-riddled suppository.” Nature-lovers argued that it would disturb the flight patterns of Parisian birds. Even as the iron lattice began to rise, Parisians continued to refer to it by the less-than-flattering nickname, “the metal asparagus.” Of course, no sooner had the tower opened in 1889 than the rabid criticism evaporated.