A gîte with a view

I guess I can call a Paris apartment a gîte [zheet], even though it's not a gîte rural. In a sense, gîte just means a place to crash (or sleep). As I wrote the other day, the first vacation apartment Walt and I ever rented was a studio on the Île Saint-Louis in 1994. We stayed in another one in 1995, after having spent ten days in a true gîte rural in south west France, near Cahors and Bergerac, and a few days in Provence in a hotel. We were driving back to Paris earlier than planned and without a hotel reservation.

We would be staying in the city for three nights. Instead of reserving a hotel room, I made a phone call to an agency called Chez Vous in the San Francisco Bay Area — we had rented the 1994 apartment through their service — and asked them if they had any last-minute vacancies. They had one. We took it. It cost less than a hotel room, and was a lot more comfortable.

This is a less-than-perfect composite image that I stitched together from three separate scanned negatives or slides more than 20 years ago.

I wasn't taking many photos back then, so I can't show you shat that apartment looked like. Walt might have some, but they'd be slides and they're packed away in boxes in a closet upstairs. The last-minute apartment was a studio located in the 7th arrondissement, not far from the Eiffel Tower, the Hôtel des Invalides, and the rue Cler market street. We found we really liked the neighborhood.

Before that experience, we had always stayed over near the Latin Quarter. That was "my" Paris neighborhood, because I had worked there as a teacher for several years back in the 1970s and early '80s. Then in 1996 we went to Paris again for a short stay, and we rented another apartment in the 7th, on the rue Fabert near Invalides, just to see if we liked it as much as we had a year earlier. It was a small studio with a sleeping loft.

This is the neighborhood in the 7th where we stayed in June 1997. I took the photo from the top of the Eiffel Tower. You can see the building our apartment was in — it's across the street from the modern glass high-rise in the middle of the image and it has wide balconies on each floor across its façade along the rue de l'Université.

Then in 1997, I was on sabbatical from my job at Apple Computer. Walt and I decided to go to Paris for two weeks. I decided I could stay there an extra two weeks. Walt went back to California, and my mother and my 15-year-old niece came to Paris stay with me for the second half of my trip. We went up to the top of the Eiffel Tower, out to Versailles, and walked through parts of the Louvre together.

For that long trip, I found another apartment in the 7th, nearer the rue Cler market street and with a good view of the Eiffel Tower. I reserved it, if I remember, for three weeks — my mother, niece, and I then spent a week in Normandy before flying back to the States. Again, I didn't take very many pictures back then — digital photography was still basically in the future. I did take some photos using a film camera, and was able to digitize them using a slide and negative scanner.

This is my niece, who was 15 years old that summer.

Walt and I stayed in this same apartment again in January 2000...