Where have all the flowers gone?

Catchy title, no?

Yesterday was too hot and too windy and threatening rain. It was 90, I think, and although 90 is marginally doable, 90 at this point in the year is too hot. So today was 59, almost as windy and even more threatening. It never actually rained yesterday and it didn't today either. So I rode my bike.

I rode to the north and there are a couple of spots that I have been waiting for the right combination of blossoms and sunlight to photograph. Particularly there is a double row of flowering crabs at Saint Odila. Well, I waited too long, the flowers are gone.

I was convincing myself that the flowering season is over until I passed these on the way home.The fruit trees may be done flowering but there are plenty of other bushes now coming forward to fill the void. Lilacs are everywhere and there is suddenly a second wave of white flowers. These look like they may have been originally planted as a hedge.

There's a story about yesterday's picture. It was our first trip to France. We have only very, very rudimentary French skills so we were extremely dependent on the Guide. Well, at the time of this trip she was still a college student and she had to go back to Nantes before we had to go back to Roseville. We were on our own in Paris for a few days.

That night I looked up Roland Garros in the Lonely Planet. The Paris Metro is, just as widely advertised, very user friendly so we had no trouble figuring out the appropriate Metro line and stop and the next day we successfully navigated to the neighborhood surrounding the stadium. From that point I learned a valuable lesson. Do not, repeat, do not try to navigate your way in Paris with a Galleries Lafayette map. It is more like a poster than an actual map and it made the few blocks from the Metro to Roland Garros into a much larger adventure than it needed to be.

We wandered down a couple of streets and eventually found ourselves walking along next to a fenced enclosure. Soon we could see that there were tennis courts on the other side of the fence. I expected that soon enough we would come to some sort of main entrance and that then we would either pay an admission and be admitted to the grounds or else we would discover that the club was closed and that the peek we were getting through the fence was as good as we were going to get.

With this in mind I was pretty excited about walking along the fence and having a good view of the courts. Not the stadium, but real courts, the outer courts where most of the French Open is played. A few steps later we heard hitting. Soon we could see someone practicing on one of the courts. Perhaps not professional quality practice, but good players striking the ball with authority. At this point I was completely satisfied with the experience. I had located Roland Garros and I had seen someone playing tennis on one of the outer courts, all without the benefit of the Guide. Pretty good stuff, no?

We kept walking to the corner of the grounds, turned left and walked across the end and left again and started back up the other side. The result of trying to navigate with the Galleries Lafayette map was that we had completely missed the front entrance and were going to have to walk pretty much all the way around the grounds before we got back to the front entrance. So we kept walking.

Halfway up the second long side we could see an access road leading on to the grounds. It had a gate, to be sure, but the gate was standing open. What the heck, the worst that could happen is that I wouldn't be able to speak any French and an exasperated French person would escort me off the grounds, right? So we walked in and wandered about among the outer courts. From inside the fence we could now easily see the people practicing and we could see that we were now approaching the stadium courts. So we walked towards them. We passed Court Suzanne Lenglen and soon arrived at the plaza between Philippe Chartrier and the original stadium, now referred to as Court 1. The original stadium has the names of winners of the tournament on a ring around the outside top. The plaza is Place des Mousquetaires and it has a replica Davis Cup and statues of the Four Musketeers of French tennis, the heroes of the sport who first won the Cup for France and successfully retained the trophy for six straight years at a time when the Davis Cup was a world championship of significance similar to that which is now accorded the World Cup of soccer. Borotra, Bugnon, Cochet and Lacoste, each in bronze in the plaza with their names on the rim of the stadium above and also on the replica Cup memorializing their accomplishment.This shot is from in front of Philippe Chartrier facing towards Court 1 in the background. The statue behind me is Borotra, the Bouncing Basque.

At this point I was way, way pleased with the whole Roland Garros experience. I had gotten in, which I wasn't sure I would be able to do. I had seen all of this stuff and I had been able to do it undisturbed, with no other tourists about.

We were just looking around and the passageway under the stadium to Philippe Chartrier was open. So we started to walk down it. No gate, no fence, no security, no nothing. We walked out the other end of the passageway at court level to an opening onto the court. We walked out and my wife took my picture and that's the story.

Good story, no?