In which I am unable to come up with a clever title for my post

Fans of Gene Stratton Porter may recognize the form that the titles of the posts on this blog take. For those who do not, the titles are a nod to the book A Girl of the Limberlost which I was happy to discover my Grandma also read. Sometimes, alas, there is no easy title of the proper form, as was the case for our excursion on Wednesday.

Blaise is currently very busy

• preparing for a week long trip to Pisa to give a talk at a conference, and
• attending bi- (or tri-)weekly talks for a monthlong workshop here in Paris

which means that, for the most part, the kids and I are more or less on our own during the day, and so, on Wednesday we headed for Parc Georges Brassens, also known as "the park with the stream" and "that park with the rock climbing-wall." Now, this particular park is one that we have been to many times, especially when Cherry was a baby, and which we very much loved. At that time, we lived at Place de Clichy, just east of the Butte Montmartre, and to get to the park required a short ride on the 2 line, followed by a rather ghastly transfer at Pigalle, a long (almost one end to the other) ride on the 12 line, and then a mile walk to the entrance to the park. 

This morning, I used the lovely RATP app on my phone to find the best route to the park, and discovered that it recommended that I take the bus, from a stop virtually outside my apartment door to a stop only a stone's throw from the entrance to the park, with only a single transfer (which we went the wrong way to find, but no matter). As we were waiting for the second bus, the one that would drop us off mere feet from the entrance to the park, I happened to look at the route map, which is posted at every bus stop, and noticed that the bus line stopped at Place de Clichy, which meant that we could have simply stepped onto the bus outside our apartment and stepped off it at our destination, skipping the long trek with kids and baby and backpack full of food.

In any case, we found our way to the park successfully, and headed toward the back of the park, past the grapevines (Georges Brassens has one of the two working vineyards in the city of Paris) and the bee hives enroute to the spot where the rose bushes bloomed in a bend of the stream. We got there, sat down, pulled out our lunch fixings, and were immediately inundated with large numbers of French schoolchildren, who on this occasion, stood respectfully while their teacher spent five minutes indicating the various parts of the flower to them, and then headed off. 

After lunch, the kids played in and around the stream, searching for its source (a waterfall coming out of a concrete block), jumping back and forth across the concrete banks, and climbing around and under the rose bushes growing along the banks, while I sat on my rear end and watched them. (Have I mentioned that it is a completely artificial stream?) When they got bored of that, we proceeded to make a circuit of the park, stopping first to climb on the rocky climbing slope and then stopping, in turn, at each of the half dozen or so play areas that ring the park. We walked around the outside edges of the park, and stopped to watch over the back wall of the park and crews worked to repair an old rail line that ran along the back of the park. We explored the gardens, turning sideways to edge between bushes of flowers and stopping to sniff the lavender along the way. And then we headed home on the bus, grateful that we didn't have to walk the mile to the train station.