13th Century HOT STUFF (and the Perils of Over-Leisure)

The whole point of vacation is leisure right? Well, we leisured it up on turbo over the past two days. And by “leisure” I mean “sleep”…the ultimate leisure. We had a day trip planned to see the Cathedral in Chartres, for which we had proactively bough train tickets the day after we arrived in Paris. Planning carefully in advance is not really our thing and today proved exactly why: excessive over-leisure caused us to miss our train. By the time we were up and moving we were 30 minutes away from train departure time with a 45 minute Metro trip to get to the station. We were able to switch to a train an hour later and only had to spend a bit of time hanging out in the Montparnasse Starbucks (not a winner). The delay crunched our Chartres touring time a bit…which also, as it turns out, worked out fine.

Chartres is a charming small town that is dominated by a huge, and famous, cathedral. Imagine, say, The Pentagon plunked down in Petaluma, CA and you’ve got the basic idea. There’s been some sort of religious building on the site since before Roman times…with the applicable religion rotating over the years to suit the current population. Seems like “christian’ rotated in sometime around 550 and stuck. The majority of the current cathedral was constructed from 1194-1260. That’s apparently considered “fast” and accounts for most of the church being in the same style. However, only one spire was completed. The second spire was not added until 1513 and you can see why the style issue is important. Both spires are nice…but they are NOT similar.

Chartres Cathedral is considered unique because of its consistent style and also because it has had very few changes since the 13th century. In fact, most of the stained glass windows are ORIGINAL. Just to set a little context, these windows were in place while the US was still owned and operated by Native Americans only. Christopher Columbus and his boats were still several hundred years away from sailing the ocean blue.

Another unique aspect of the cathedral is the large labyrinth near the entrance. Apparently the full labyrinth can only be seen when all the chairs are removed every Friday. Since we did not research carefully and therefore arrived on a Wednesday, most of what we saw was in aisles and under chairs:

The full thing looks like this (photo not ours):

The cathedral is in the process of being carefully restored. You can see the difference between those sections that have been completed and those that have not in the two pictures below:

We spent nearly two hours walking around but because of timing were not able to tour the crypt (Jon loves a good pile of bones and relics). As we were deciding whether to eat or tour the town the heavens opened up with some serious rain, for which we were – of course – not prepared. So town sightseeing was OFF and eating was ON. We chose a small, quaint, very French brasserie in the small, quaint, and very French old section of town. We were enjoying a yummy and very large, quaint, French meal when we were yanked right out of all the quaint Frenchess by the aural assault of HOT STUFF (I need some HOT STUFF baby tonight). There’s nothing like a good dose of Donna Summer to remind you that all is not quaint, French, and stuck in the 13th century. Still, there are some places and times when you just aren’t prepared for Disco.