Chartres en Lumiere

A little over an hour out of Paris is the town of Chartres. It's a rather small city with a very large cathedral containing the most original medieval stained glass of any cathedral. Ten years ago we visited for the day and told ourselves that should we ever visit again we should spend the night.  Just by chance, someone in Bob's photo Meetup group mentioned that in the evenings the town is transformed by projection machines that illuminate the cathedral, bridges, and miscellaneous buildings all over the old part of the city.  We imagined a rainbow of colors projected on the buildings, but nothing like we experienced that evening!  As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so here you go:  I've juxtaposed the daylight versions with the illuminated ones to show you how amazing it was.

Three sides of the cathedral were illuminated. I only took photos of one side, but you get the idea.  

I can't begin to understand how this technology works, it was totally enchanting to watch.  What my photos don't show is that each illumination was not static, but ever changing for a period of minutes, as though it was animated.  I tried to illustrate this in the photo above of one side of the cathedral.  

We arrived in Chartres late afternoon, and Bob had a miserable cold!  We had already booked our Air BnB so Bob just forced himself to keep moving.  The illumination didn't start until 10 pm, so we checked into our BnB and then went to a nearby pizza takeout, which turned out to be excellent!  We ate by the river facing the red structure and bridge in the top photo, not realizing they would be totally transformed in a few hours.  We did wonder about the big ugly boxes on stilts in the river across from the structures...

At 10 we headed out to see what was going on and were totally enchanted!  We wandered through the streets until 1 am, like children who are visiting Disneyland for the first time!  You would think there would be crowds of people, but there were very few!  At one point I had a nice long conversation with a couple from Belgium, who happened to be staying in a BnB a few miles outside of Chartres and had come into town for dinner.  They didn't even know about the illumination until they began walking around after dinner.  They had been to the beach that day and we're still in their rather lightweight beach attire on a chilly evening.  But they loved it!

The young man who owned the Air BnB we stayed in (for only €40) was a professional athlete in a sport called Handball, but not what you're probably thinking.  It's kind of a cross between basketball and soccer, played on a grassy field. It's very popular in Germany.  I highly recommend Air BnB, we have met so. Any wonderful hosts this way. It's so much more interesting than staying in a hotel!

Here's a photo of our delicious French petite dejeuner (breakfast):