Demre

A couple more hours on a bus, winding down the Lycian coast, brings you through dry, rocky countryside with huge swarths of greenhouses in the valleys.

Originally, I had the idea to hike the entire Lycian way. It's a fairly recently blazed trail that goes from Antalya to Fethyie along the coast, connecting ancient cities and ruins. After much research and hemming and hawing, I realized that it wouldn't be an ideal hike. It gets very hot and dry here, and most of the trail winds through near-wilderness. Getting to fresh water on a daily basis would have been a challenge. Also, though it was beautiful, the landscape if fairly unchanged the entire 510 km of the route. You got ocean, you got cliffs, you got rocks, you got scrub brush, you got tombs. Not really too much variation there. I wanted to walk bits of it, see some amazing things, but maybe not commit to the entire trail. A little zip around the internet, and hell yes, I found an easier way.

Do as the ancients do, and sail the coast. It ended up bring a brilliant idea.

The boat was harbored in Demre, another ancient settlement on the Lycian way. Oddly enough, there were gift shops everywhere in Demre selling all things Santa Claus and Christmas. The main attraction in Demre is an ancient Byzantine church which the original St Nicholas was once buried. He was a Bishop of Myra and lived along the Lycian coast for most of his life while doing good deeds and gifting poor women coins so they wouldn't have to prostitute themselves.

We had to kind of elbow our way inside the church as it was packed with tour groups full of orthodox Christian pilgrams. I found it rather hilarious, but most of the women and several of the men were wearing skimpy beach coverups and beachwear, and yet they had the decency to wear a scarf on their heads while at the church. I must say, the whole experience made me feel much better about my own cellulite situation.

Inside the church, there was a tomb there where St Nick was once buried. People were going batshit insane over it- laying their hands on it and wailing and crying and praying and leaving objects of offering on top and pushing through the scrum to get their hands on it.

It was insane. I wonder if they all knew that the remains of St Nick had been moved to Bari, Italy about a thousand years ago, with some minor fragments of the skeleton ending up in Venice. Seriously. The Italians have been lording over his bones since the year 1087. And this wasn't even his orignal

After that brief encounter with the Saint Who Wasn't There, it was off to the harbor for lunch and to begin an adventure on the high seas.

Bateau on the Seine

I do love having company. Aside from the social aspect of re-connecting with old friends, it's great fun for me to take people around town. I feel like an undercover tourist, able to really see the city again through naive tourist eyes. I'm not sick of it yet anyway.

The day was warm and sunny, so we planned to have a picnic on the Champ de Mars, but we were going to get there creatively. We looked at several boat companies and settled on the hop-on, hop-off one so we could get back home eventually.

Well.

It didn't quite work out as smoothly as promised as we ended up waiting for several boats before one would actually let us on, and on the way home, the river was too high to pass under the bridges past the Louvre (but, you know...no announcement, just a bemused curiosity as to whey we got to turn around and do it all over again), so we ended up making another loop around and then having to take the metro home. Anyway...the company was fine, the picnic was good, and the scenery from the back of the boat was as good of a way as any to check out the city on a fine sunny Sunday.

That's the Tour Saint-Jacques. It was part of a church that was destroyed during the revolution, but oddly enough, instead of razing the whole thing in the aftermath, they just left the church steeple as a monument.

One odd thing to see on such a sunny day: jet contrails zig-zagging across the sky. It's usually so cloudy here, you don't see them.

Parisians will sit out by the river and picnic every possible chance they can get.

It's so dreary here for most of the year, it's a real mood lifter, and for days after a sunny weekend, you will see the people of Paris with telltale pink cheeks and odd tan lines.

Pont Alexander is, by far, the most ornate bridge.

Destination picnic!

The lawns around the Eiffel Tower are popular with locals and tourist alike. It's great people watching, and sitting on a blanket with our wine and cutting board of fromage and saucisson sec and good baguette got us in some starring roles of tourist photographs all over the world.