Hey folks,
Your old pal Jeff here, with a big shocker if you haven’t been following my socials recently – after ten years of saving up, my wife Krystal and I finally went on a big trip (for our 10 year wedding anniversary) to Paris, France!
It about put us in the poor house, was a runaround and a half, and had a pretty rough ending but the two of us agreed it was the best trip of our entire lives! We saw Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower, Mont Saint-Michel, went to the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, the medieval museum, I saw my favorite painting in the history of fine art up close and in person, had a riverboat ride up and down the Seine river, and explored a ton of Paris proper on foot. I can’t really tell you what that means to two people from backwoods, bumfuck nowhere, West Virginia who grew up poor as dirt and never saw much in our futures, man. Oh, by the way, all these photos in this blog were taken by me! Or Krystal!
We both planned the entire trip around a visit to the most famous museum in the world, as far as I know, The Louvre. I was genuinely psyched outta my gourd to see all the art, the sculpture, the tapestries, everything. Krystal was too but she isn’t writing this so we can focus on how I feel for a second, thank you. Left is a photo of the two of us outside the famous Louvre glass pyramid, surrounded by other people waiting in line for like 40 minutes, but also some gorgeous architecture and a genuinely uncountable amount of beautiful marble statues lining the pulpits all along them. Genuinely breathtaking to be standing there, even if it was alternatively way too hot or way too cold the whole time.
If you wanna see more specific photos of what we saw inside the Louvre you can see ’em in the huge gallery of photos at the bottom of the page, by the way. Still, the line was super worth it, because you wouldn’t believe what the place looks like inside. Or what it smells like. For real, for some reason the entire Louvre smells like an open sewer in some places and we figured it was probably down to the air conditioning system being ancient and just stinky, but this is a known phenomenon we hadn’t ever heard about before coming so prepare your nose! Toucan Sam need not apply.
The most famous piece in the entire museum, and one of the big reasons we’d set out to go there to begin with, was the Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci. I’m telling you this like you don’t already know or something, but still. It’s widely known, if you didn’t know.
There was an actual human funnel of people in a giant mostly-empty room with this painting on a wall at the far end of it just handing on a big black roller wall thing with felt over it, out in the open. You wouldn’t believe the squeeze of human bodies that pressed into you as you tried to navigate the sea of them filling up this room between the door and the painting. This weird angle shot of it was all I could get before they had yeeted my old ass straight out of the cuddle puddle and into the empty gallery beyond.
Still, it’s a once in a lifetime moment to stand face to face with perhaps the most famous piece of art in the history of humankind. Maybe only the cave paintings stands as more of a testament to the globe-spanning majesty that is the creation of art. I do prefer The Last Supper though, I won’t lie to you.
If you’ve never been to the Louvre, and up until very recently I hadn’t either, then you may be surprised to learn that a decent amount of it looks like the photo on the left. We sure were. There are certainly paintings on the walls, standard-ish galleries here and there, but for the most part the entire museum is gilded from floor to ceiling in some of the most intricate patterning you could imagine, with paintings on the ceiling stretching from one side to the other 20 to 25 feet above your head, ornately painted and decorated. It was honestly really hard to focus on the paintings when surrounded by such levels of opulence. I eat Ramen noodles for multiple meals a weak, man. This is not my scene usually. Otherwordly!
I gained an appreciation for photography during our trip, too! I’ve always loved the beauty in others photography and considered is as important an art form as any other, but during this trip something really clicked for me. Whether it was just finally having something grandiose to practice on or unlocking that part of my mind that was separating my ability to do layouts in my paintings and sketches from my ability to minds eye layout photos as I take them it still just happened all at once and suddenly I was taking photos I thought were pretty good! Would they stand up in a photography professors class critique? Probably not. But I really enjoy taking photos now.
The two above sculptures are from the sculpture garden at the very center of the Louvre which is filled with some of the most incredible stone work I’ve ever seen in my life. The masters works of masters works just all spread out and perfectly set against one another to make you feel like you’re walking through an ancient Greek temple. There were dozens of people sitting around on the ground with sketchbooks and small painting easels with tons of tiny bottles of gray paints of every tone you can imagine scattered out between them. It honestly made me a little jealous I hadn’t brought my sketchbooks from home. It felt like a wasted chance! But I was on vacation, and specifically set out to not do any working during it, so it’s probably for the best.
On our first day there, right after getting of a plane and dropping off our luggage at the hotel, we hot-stepped it right on down the street (or a bunch of streets really, even if it felt super close) to Notre Dame, the most beautiful cathedral in the world in my opinion and it did not disappoint at all. The photo I took, which is kinda washed out with the sun and before I realized I could take picture good, doesn’t do it justice whatsoever. There tends to be an extreme ornateness to things in Paris that is wonderful but can become eye-straining and Notre Dame bypasses that with some of the most excellent use of negative space I’ve ever seen while still being incredibly ornate. Statues, frescos, reliefs, glasswork, you name it.
Below are a couple photos from inside which showcase the intricate stained glass windows which cover the sides and front of the cathedral as well as some of the unbelievable architecture within. My college art history professor, Prof. Jackson, would have loved every second of being inside Notre Dame. I never got to ask her if she had been there when she was alive but I really hope so. I was thinking of her a lot during the entire tip, honestly.
A big reason for the trip, for my wife Krystal, was to get me in front of my favorite painting in the history of fine art, “Le Chevalier aux fluers”, or “Knight of the Flowers” by Georges Rochegrosse so she can take photos of me in awe and giggle. With that mission in mind we went to the Musee d’Orsay, another world class art museum that is actually just right across the river from The Louvre, across a single bridge, which was insane to me.
I genuinely stood there gawking at it for what felt like forever. My photo does not do it justice at all.
I realize this is getting kind of long-winded and maybe people don’t really wanna sit around reading about someone elses trip to another country, but I did wanna take a second to shout out the French on something that was finally proven firsthand to me after a lifetime of hearing about it: their immensely delicious food. We had steak frittes multiple times, crispy duck, pastry shop baguettes, you name it we had it and it was some of the most delicious food I’ve ever had in my life.
Shout out Rich Masters, a buddy of mine you may know from some of the podcasting I do, for suggesting a resteraunt called Les Botanistes which was a hole in the wall in the middle of nowhere down some side street where an old woman walked us through the french chalkboard menu for both dinner and dessert and it instantly went on my top 5 meals I’ve ever eaten mental list. In-credible. If you ever go, please look it up! Do NOT tell them an American who couldn’t get out a half sentence of French sent you.
We did end up having our flight home cancelled and having to stay an extra day in France, at a hotel at the airport, unfortunately, but the actual flight home was good itself. The airline even has to reimburse us for the hotel and meals we had between our flight being cancelled and the next one they set up for us, which will be dope as hell if they go through with it cause that extra day ate our lunch right in front of our faces, financially speaking. Also, Charles De Gaulle airport, get your shit together dude. There’s only ONE exit for the entire terminal and it’s underneath a single terminal hub, in the opposite direction of where every exit sign is pointing, around the corner you can barely see at the bottom of some stairs, through a hallway that only one person at a time can fit through, through a door with a giant red minus mark on it??? We were trapped in that terminal for almost two godamn hours, man. We basically led an expedition team to escape that airport, no one could figure out how to get out. We thought we’d stumbled into pergatory for a while!
Even with that ignominious ending, it still ended up being the greatest trip of our lives. We probably won’t even make it back to Paris, being an artist and a school teacher and broke as hell after all, but we’ll always cherish the memories we made there, the places we saw, the food we ate, the art we reveled in. If you can scrape up a small fortune over 10 years like we did, I can’t recommend going to Paris enough!
— Jeff
Jeff Pennington 