Art of Travel: Giverny: Biking and Being Artsy

This past weekend I went to Giverny with a couple of my friends for the day. Giverny is a little town about 45 minutes outside of Paris and it is famous for being the site of Claude Monet’s house and gardens. I heard from many friends who went earlier in the semester that it was completely worth it and absolutely beautiful so we decided that we would go before it is too cold to enjoy being outside.

We left on Saturday in the early afternoon from the Gare St. Lazare train station and arrived shortly after 1:00 PM in Vernon, which is the town closest to Giverny. From there you can take a taxi, bus, or bike to complete the journey. We decide that the Bike option sounded like the most fun, so we rented bikes and grabbed a map.

I had seen pictures from friends who opted to take the bikes as well so I was imagining a leisurely, scenic, and flowery ride of about 30 minutes. Of course, even though it was beautiful all morning and there was no sign of rain when I checked weather.com in the morning, it started to rain as soon as we got on our bikes. It didn’t rain very hard but it was enough to be obnoxious and make the bike ride slightly less pleasant than what I had anticipated.

Once we got there, the rain stopped and the sun came out. The rest of the afternoon was beautiful as we walked around the gardens and toured Monet’s home. We also brought some chalk pastels (borrowed from my sweet art teacher) along for our journey so that we could experience the gardens in a truly “Monet manner.” This was really fun but also really funny. I certainly do not claim to be an artist but I like to think that I can create some semblance of a nice picture if I put my mind to it, but pastels are a particularly difficult medium to work with and the final outcome wasn’t exactly what I would describe as beautiful. All the other people walking around the gardens kept stopping to look at what we were doing and it was funny to see their reactions when they realized that we were not actually very talented artists. Nonetheless I am really glad that we did this because it was a different experience from just walking around and forced me to really pay attention to the details of the place.

After several hours in the garden we started to get a little bit chilly so we headed to a quaint little inn to have some lunch and warm up. The inn was absolutely adorable and very quite so we enjoyed a nice, relaxing lunch before grabbing our bikes and heading back to the train station, when of course it started to rain again.

Despite the rain during our bike rides, Giverny was an absolutely wonderful place and I would recommend going to anyone who has the chance. It really gives you a new appreciation and perspective of all Monet’s paintings that you see in museums after seeing his original inspiration.