France, a bit of Luxembourg and Germany.

Were back! And what a glorious 2 weeks we had. To sum it up, we drove lots, slept in a different hotel almost every night, did lots of sight seeing and drank lots of champagne and wine. I found a new appreciation for red wine or rather have developed a liking to it and preferred it over white wine.
The weather was perfect with it sliding into Autumn beautifully! The leaves were changing colors and I took full advantage of it by running almost every other day. France is such a beautiful country and I totally fell in love with it! Paris was by far the best of all the "big" cities we went to, but we enjoyed ourselves just as much in the small little towns with their big characters.
We rented a car and covered quite a bit of ground. Paris, Champagne, Luxembourg, Germany, Burgundy, Loire Valley, Brittany and then back to Paris.
If we could do it again we would probably have stayed longer in Champagne, Epernay and Luxembourg. It was a shame we had to pack up after only 1 night at each place.
We didn't expect those places to be as nice as they were, but at least we did get a feel for the place and we have great memories now.


One of the great things about France and Luxembourg are there great bike paths in certain cites. How genius to have a car lane, bike lane and pedestrian lane! Motozo wished he had his bike with him a few times as we enviously saw many many cyclist peddling through beautiful vineyards and towns.
We also got the feeling that French (Or maybe its a European thing) are much more eco friendly and energy saving over Japanese. You hardly see anyone carrying plastic bags when grocery shopping since everyone brings their own shopping bags when they shop. And in alot of hotels you have to manually switch on the lights in the hallways and a timer will switch them off.
At one hotel we were at, the bathroom had a roof window which minimized the need to use the light in the bathroom all day.
Another great thing is their daylight saving! We still had daylight at 9PM!
This was especially wonderful when we were driving for 5 hours on some days, but still managed to do sight seeing in the evening when we finally arrived at our destination. Dammit Japan, you seriously need to start daylight saving!

Of course, we had a few frustrating moments when some people gave us some very rude looks because our French wasn't perfect and at some restaurants the service was SO slow we ended up walking out to find another place. But for the most part people were nice and very helpful and we managed to communicate what we wanted.
Anyway, I'll let the photos do the talking now.












More photos HERE
A lot are same with my facebook so sorry if you already saw them there. I think it'll be mainly Lilia who haven't seen them.