Easter Morning

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I got a nice drive-by sky on the way to the Shrine of the Little Flower, St. Thérèse and the Infant Jesus Catholic Church for Easter service Easter Morning. While we were in France last summer we went to various Catholic Churches in Provence and Paris and really liked the French services. We went to a service at St. Thérèse in early March that Suzette sang in, and we liked the church.  St. Thérèse was French, the church has stained glass from France, and Reverend Chavez lived and worked for many years in Europe, so there is a “French Connection” at St. Thérèse that we liked. The 10:00 am service was packed (standing room only), the sermon was fantastic and the music (guitar accompinament) was very good.

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Cookies

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Laurie made batches of delicious chocolate chip cookies. For a while it looked like they were going to go on forever. If you have not used SILPAT cooking mats, they are wonderful — nothing sticks to them.

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Love on the Seine

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The sky was overcast and gray all day for solstice, which reminded me of Paris. Looking through my photos taken from a riverboat on our last day in Paris back in June, I noticed that there was lots of love along the Seine despite the gray sky and rain.

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Paris Authentic

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Does anyone remember Marcel Duchamp’s found art? The urinal he simply signed “R. Mutt 1917” was discussed it my art, art history, photo and photo history classes when I was a geography/photography student some 30 years ago. We finally got to see it in person at the Pompidou Center in Paris in June. Even though this piece was quite popular among the art professors and art students at the university, I didn’t have to hold my camera above crowds of admiring people to get a photo of Duchamp’s porcelain masterpiece, as Laurie pointed out. I could actually touch it as there were no barriers around it, alarms to set off or even a guard in the room.

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So Much for the Opera

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I had to do major sneaking to get this photograph of the cutaway model of the opera in Paris. It was in a museum that strictly forbid photos, and there were guards everywhere to remind people not to take photos. First I had to wait for a break in the hordes of tourists marveling at the model, then I had to wait for the guard to get up and walk out of earshot of my shutter before I could sneak a pic. It took several tries over three different visits to the museum before I got a successful stealth photo of the model. One reason I wanted a photo of this model is because the box seats on the end of the first row of box seats was the box we sat in when we went to an opera at the end of May. The apartment we rented in Paris was a block from the Opera. The second photo was taken from the middle of the street by the apartment and the third photo is looking the other way toward the Louvre at the bottom of the street.

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Smile for the Camera

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I find it interesting how digital cameras, and using cell phones to do photos, has changed the way people photograph each other, the attractions they visit, and themselves. I took most of these photos of people photographing each other, or taking a break from photographing each other, at the Musée d’Orsay.  I like the photos in B&W because they have a 60’s look with people using modern digital cameras and phones to do their photos and then check out the results.

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Tail Wind

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As we continue our adventures on the Rhône delta, a cyclist was riding down the the beach at the same time we were driving down. With the nice tail wind, we was able to ride the speed limit all the way to the beach. He was from Switzerland and was riding his bike across southern France on his way to Spain.

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End of the Road

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At the end of the Route de la Mer on the Rhône delta is a nice, sandy beach. However, when we were there close to 9:30 pm on May 22nd, the Mistral winds that blow from the Alps to the sea, accelerating as they pass through the Rhône and Durance valleys, were blowing at almost hurricane force at the end of our road. The wind was so strong it seemed to stretch shadows, and even using a shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second, the sand blowing across the beach is a blur. Mistral winds blow day and night for three to four days straight without letting up.

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Flamingos

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Now that we are seeing more Sandhill Cranes, I’m noticing the similarities between the cranes and the wild Flamingos we saw along the Route de la Mer that runs to the Mediterranean Sea on the Rhône delta in May. After looking at the area on Google Maps, it looks like the areas the Flamingos are wading in and flying over are normally dry. It was an unusually wet spring for Provence this year.

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