Rain or Shine? An Open-Air Question

Right from the gecko get-go, Thursday was a day to be worried about the weather. Reports, as far back as we'd been able to wrangle them from online weather predictors, had been warning of rain all this week. And today was not only the day we were going to be visiting the famed Giverny gardens constructed and maintained by Claude Monet, but we were planning on having a picnic lunch outside. Would the weather gods smile on us or rain down upon us?

Well, perhaps a little of both. We took a school bus to Giverny, a fairy tale village of a town that seemed to exist wholly to support the visiting tourist industry. We began at the Giverny Museum of Impressionism, where we were given a talk about a current exhibit, a comparison between Monet's work and that of Jean-Francis Auburtin, an impressionist painter, muralist, and scholar in architecture. Auburtin visited many of the locations featured in Monet's paintings and produced his own versions of the same landscapes. Despite both being impressionists and despite Auburtin clearly having been influenced by the elder artist, his technique and material were quite different than Monet's, and the parallel works also revealed variance in style and focus within scenes.

There had been sprinklings of rain as we drove to the museum, but the sky had cleared somewhat, and some stone benches by a church and monument were mostly dry. We sat and had sandwiches and made some of the least attractive faces ever as we chewed and chatted.

We then had some time to shop and wander through the town before we made our way to the grounds of the estate, which was divided into three sections: the flower gardens in the front of the house, the house itself with its studio space and living areas, and the water gardens, a manufactured pond with a small bamboo grove and the famous water lilies.

The rain had held off entirely during our lunch and ramble, and mostly during the first two-thirds of the visit to the gardens. Perhaps we had spent all of our wandering and not hastening to the main event. It began to sprinkle, then rain, and then the clouds dropped torrents of water on us from a great height, with thunder rumbling. We ducked for cover in the gift shop, and eventually gathered back at the bus after rounding up a few stragglers. On the drive home, the sky ahead was clear and blue, but with grey sheets of rain walling off the sky to the left of the bus, and visible lightning bolts jumping from cloud to cloud.

No photos of the lightning, but look at these fine sparks finding amusement in a tentative setting.