Almost back to Paris! Joséphine's Château de Malmaison, Conflans - Thursday, June 25th, Day 7

-
It was already Thursday!  This cruise was going so quickly....today we had two different included options for our morning. We could either go to visit Van Gogh's Auvers-sur-Oise.  This is where Van Gogh spent his last three months. I'd heard this was a great tour! Or we could go to visit the palace that Josephine purchased for Napoleon and herself, the Château de Malmaison. Carol and I decided that today would be a day of Palaces, and chose the Château.



In 1799 Joséphine purchased the run down estate while Napoléon Bonaparte was away fighting.  He wasn't too happy about the purchase, but she vowed to make Malmaison "the most beautiful and curious garden in all of Europe, a model of good cultivation".  

We toured many of the rooms of the Château which was restored in the early 20th century.








Joséphine's dinner service






Joséphine's personal toiletries




The luxurious bedchamber of Joséphine








And then we have Joséphine's common chamber








The billiard room


and the music room




The library



The dining room


The gardens are nothing like what they once were.  As a matter of fact, at one time there was a heated orangery, over 300 pineapple plants, and Joséphine cultivated over 200 plants in France for the first time. She grew over 250 varieties of roses and the property was known for the rose garden all over the country.  But in addition to the gardens, she had all different animals roaming throughout, including kangaroos, black swans, zebras, emus, sheep, llamas, and gazelles to name a few!  It must have been quite the palace!



We enjoyed our visit quite a bit.  It was time to head back to the ship for lunch, and then we had a visit planned to the palace of all palaces!   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

San Pedro, hustle and bustle!

-
Image
Ambergris Caye…it’s an interesting place to be! As I mentioned in some previous posts, we chose a resort to the north of the town of San Pedro. Portofino is only accessible by water taxi and it’s about a fifteen minute boat ride to get there. But when you get into the heart of the island the pace of life picks up. It’s still a sleepy island town by all means. But there’s much more hustle and bustle! The first thing we noticed was the primary means of transportation are golf carts. There’s a few taxi vans, but most people are driving golf carts. This is certainly unique! There’s a certain charm about this for sure. Our main reasons for going into town were to get to the dive shops, but that only brought us to the docks…to eat lunch and dinner once or twice and the obligatory souvenir shopping. We didn’t get a chance to really see any of the other hotels in the area. In my obsessive research before the trip, there were quite a few that looked nice, but now that I was there I
Read more

You'd better Belize it!

-
Image
That's right - Belize.  The first question so many people would ask was, where's Belize? They hadn't even heard of the country!  This was common I found because Belize was formerly known as British Honduras and didn't change it's name until 1973.  The second question I was asked was why do you want to go to Belize?  Belize suddenly began popping up to me in my obsessive travel research about two years ago.  I had been planning our second trip to Costa Rica and kept seeing great travel information about Belize and of course I wanted to see what was the big draw!  K and I have been to Mexico several times and had been to Costa Rica once previously and since I was planning our second trip to Costa Rica I kept Belize in the back of my mind for a future trip.  I started to do some research and found Belize has the second largest barrier reef in the world!  Now that's something!  Neither K nor I dive, but we both enjoy snorkeling so right there that was a great opp
Read more

A Beautiful Morning

-
Image
Imagine opening your eyes and seeing this.... Imagine that! I woke up early one morning and pulled back the cotton curtains to see if the sun had risen up above the sea yet, and this was what greeted me. I just had to grab my camera! I went out on our porch and sat there just in awe of the beauty of the place we were. How lucky we were to be here! How lucky to experience such beauty! I snapped a picture with my cell phone to send home to the kids. I wished they were here to share this moment with me. There were so many parts of this adventure that they would love, and yet so many parts that would be enjoyed so much more in a few more years. The timing just wasn’t quite right yet. I enjoyed this amazing sunrise alone…I didn’t wake up K yet. He wouldn’t quite appreciate the beauty of it the way I did. He was sound asleep still. He’d enjoy it in a picture. For me, my day was already perfect.
Read more