Announcing the Fall Vintage Tour: Paris!   After many many requests from my tour veterans of the Provence vintage tours, I am very proud to present The Vintage Tour: Paris.

Not only was Paris was my first French home, but it’s a mecca for any vintage enthusiast, and now a world center for vintage inspired innovative design.

Here’s a little taste of what’s to come.

We will be staying in my favorite neighborhood, the 6th, just steps away from the Luxembourg Gardens (one of the most beautiful spots on earth).

Because I can’t choose just one café in the neighborhood let’s do  breakfast at a different café every morning (a café crawl, if you will).  There is something pretty magical about being up early with the Parisians, and having breakfast with the locals in these extraordinarily beautiful cafés. (The morning café crawl is entirely optional.)

Each day we discover a different aspect of the city, the focus being on vintage and classic Paris.  Food, shopping, parisiennes, markets, Paris restaurants, a little history, joie de vivre, brocantes and champagne are some of the backdrops of this very special week.

One day we walk in the footsteps of Coco Chanel on a private tour given by a local clothes design historian.

Another day has us leaving the city to discover one thing that makes Paris sparkle – champagne!

I’m extra excited to be bringing you to the place that inspired my family to start our own winery decades ago, which then led to the founding of Le Trip (originally vineyard & wine themed travel) and morphed into the vintage theme many years ago.  We take off in the morning to visit some very special champagne houses and are back in the evening with plenty of time for another evening in Paris.

It would be a Le Trip tour without vintage shopping, and our weekend is chock full of dreamy markets.  St. Ouen is the mother of all vintage markets (quite literally – it was the first of its kind and has inspired countless others across the planet.

Our week will be filled with even more adventures.  World-famous dining out in Paris, the café scene, boutique shopping, meeting the locals and more will become lifelong memories.

After Paris,  you may choose to stay with us as we explore Provence.  Jump on the fabulous speed train and we’ll pick up again in the south of France!

As always, the cost is as affordable as I can make it, in the hopes to put this special time in the reach of as many as I can. $2065 for the six day tour.  But only 6 people maximum! So call  contact Jill soon at Jill@leTrip,org or call 510 206 3284 to claim your spot today!

Last weekend was the big celebrity yard sale in L.A.   Teri Hatcher of the Desperate Housewives series was the woman behind the charity event that brings awareness and flows funds to Juvenile Arthritis research.

The sale took place on the lawn of a high end shopping center.  Here’s the line in front of a Tiffany’s boutique.

A paparazzi moment in the middle of the sale.

Al Pacino donated a couple of iconic framed photos from Scarface and The Godfather to the silent auction.

Bargain celebrity bras and glam shoes were on the table and a Desperate Housewives carry-on suitcase.

Ellen DeGeneres donated an outfit – just like you’d see her wear on her shows.

 Gwen  Stefani donated a couple of pairs of neat shoes.

 Remember this from Seinfeld?

You could even take away celebrity furniture.

…..or a French vintage school poster from yours truly.  My booth was set up in front of a sushi restaurant.

Et voila!  I met some neat ladies who may be coming on a vintage shopping tour in Provence or Paris in the fall.  If you’re interested, there are still a few spots left.  Email me at Jill [at] leTrip [dot] org

If you’re in L.A. this weekend, come see me and my French vintage school posters

at the toney Americana At Brand in Glendale.

Teri Hatcher, a garage sale enthusiast, will be hosting her third celebrity garage sale at this new venue.

You may pick up Ellen Degeneres’ tennis and jeans, something from Chevy Chase’s den or  some other  surprise once handled by a Hollywood star.

Check out Teri speaking about it at a local L.A. station.

Come say hello and you can see and acquire posters like this!

A bientot!

I don’t know how the term made the leap to mean snapshot, but it did.

Now here’s a cliché for love, presented to you on this Valentine’s Day.

Le Baiser de l'Hotel de Ville

A cliché of a cliché, if you will.   There’s a great story behind this famous photo taken in front of the Hotel de Ville in Paris.   I hope you have a couple minutes to read it.  I wont spoil the funny and very French line at the end.  Very cute.

I wish you a nice Valentine’s Day, whether you have a honey or don’t.  My stepmother (divorced from my dad) is giving a party for her dateless girlfriends tonight.  I think it’s a great idea.  I’d join her, but she lives in Arizona.  Are you doing anything special to celebrate today?  Bonne Fete!

I’ve been selling in the markets in California lots this winter.  Having a grand time and meeting some terrific people.  (I’m not missing Provence quite so much!)  At Alameda two Sundays ago, Dona, a neat woman with a good eye, got a glimpse of my ancient candelabra from Provence (those of you who have been on a vintage buying tour - it came from the Noel’s!), and my fabulous 1940′s American vintage wallpaper press lamp with bakelite plug.

Now you have to have a good eye at markets, right?  A treasure can look pretty junky in a market setting.  I don’t have an elaborate set up, so one has to use her imagination to see how fabulous a piece really is.

They’re there circled in red.

And this candelabra is so ancient that it looks fake.

Dona’s charming friend/husband/boyfriend/companion (or all of the above?) thought it was something from Marshall’s I think.  We’re so used to seeing replicas of things that when it’s the real deal, it’s not so obvious.

Well, during our heated negotiations, I asked Dona if she would be kind enough to send over a photo in its new home.  (By the way I would love LOVE it if you have something in your home you bought from me, and took a snap and sent it for the blog or Facebook!)    I had a feeling Dona’s house would be lovely, and now I know it is.  Here is my her little baby in its new home.

Et voila!

Fab, yes?  She’d mentioned a fireplace grill at the market.  Wow what a grill.  It looks like out of a Spanish villa.  And can’t you just see a pre-electricity era Spanish woman in flowing gown carrying the candelabra as she walks out into her veranda in the evening?

….now maybe we get to see ’40′s lamp in its new surroundings when new shade comes in.  That’s a hint, Dona.

Now, since I have been sooo inactive in my blog, it looks like Feedblitz or whatever delivers my posts to your inbox put me at the back of the line.  Which is the reason my Christmas gift wrap idea landed in your inbox around about mid January, a month after I posted it.  So, I imagine as you read this you know who won the Superbowl and the February Alameda market is but a sweet memory.

But I have to start somewhere, and right here and now is where and when I get back into the saddle.  I hope that after a couple wees of posting that the blog post deliveries will be more timely.

Meanwhile, I am gearing up for Sunday market.  Picking up my market trailer later today at my dad’s winery, J. Foster Mitchell Winery,  in Amador.

Getting a new lock installed on it, and bringing it back home to fill with some nice goodies.  I’ll take some picks of the market action and post next week.

So, we shall see if the market is bustling with football widows or if it’s a buyer’s market!  Leave a comment here if you are going or staying home for the parties.

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I am so excited to have found something to do with my large collection of plastic shopping bags.  Thank you so much,Ez, at Creature Comforts for the great post!

If you are green,  like me, or into crafts, like me, or don’t have store bought bows around (these are more clever anyway) they make great toppers for your vintage presents.  My French boyfriend, though, doesn’t dig this.  He said he wouldn’t want to be given “trash” as a gift.  I would LOVE to receive this, so I guess the moral is think about the future owner of your gift and his or her perspective.

This is the result of having my way with a cute French toy shop bag.

Here’s Creative Jewish Mom’s lesson on making one of your own.

And this is a nifty way I discovered last weekend while at Chateau d’Estoublon doing some Christmas shopping with Pascal.  This is how they wrapped a fig concoction – it’s so pretty and you can use all natural products to wrap with: actual fig leaves or else recycled green paper and raffia.

Anoother green idea from the chateau: use branches in your light fixture to dangle Christmassy items.  I used to do this at our family winery for the big winemaker dinners.  Adding decoration to a hanging light fixture is really fun and makes a fantastic statement.

On your next visit to Provence, if you are near Les Baux de Provence or Arles, this place is a nice destination for wine and olive oil tasting in a castle.

Tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, I will go to the Christmas market in Aix en Provence and get some pix to post over the weekend.

Ciao for now!

Hi!  I wanted to let you know I’ll be selling at the Rosebowl this Sunday.  If you’re around come say hi at booth C6, antiques section!

The “whoops” part of the blog post title – well, this is interesting.  I am getting a boutique set up right in the leTrip website here.  So I’ve been poking around in the backstage of the site.  Lo and behold there are emails for requests for information on the tours that go back two years.  I never saw them, or knew that they could exist.  So, dear reader, if you were someone who contacted me through the website (probably that “contact me” icon there on the right corner) I really apologize.  The last thing I would do is ignore such an inquiry.   I’ll be checking that page daily now.  Lessened learned the hard way.

Anyway, I will be writing everybody, one by one and you should hear from me in the next couple of days.

Interested in knowing when the online boutique opens?  email me at Jill [at] leTrip [dot] org and I’ll add you to the boutique list.

Okay, see you at the Rosebowl?

Hasta!

Got my computer stolen on a train to Nice at the beginning of the summer and have had a heck of a time getting my online act together, what with all the changes and lack of reference.  Am happy to report that I can now access my blog admin and will be doing posts as I can. 

One of the changes is that I have a brick and mortar, in addition to selling French vintage online.  I’ll be in this lovely shop through Christmas and I started this last July.  It’s my first experience in retail and am learning lots.  The shop is called Topia and is a 40 second walk from my sweet home.  Posts on them to follow.  Once in a while in retail I come across very interested, interesting types.  Such is the case with Brian Murphy of the Los Angeles area www.bmurphyfineart.com.  He was interested in some 200 year old documents I have for sale and wanted to know everything about how I acquired them, not to mention every last detail I knew about the docs.  He’ll be using them in his art and as he said, the story is everything.  I found this post from the barge trip where I found the docs and thought I’d resurrect it.  It’s full of good info for you if you ever do your own self-drive barge trip.  I highly recommend these trips if you’re someone who can go two miles an hour and like it.

Without further ado, my life of two years ago:

The barge trip was lovely.  Like I said in the Facebook photos of the trip – it was a floating meditation.

There’s so much to say about it that it’s a challenge to summarize it into a blog post.  It seemed like everyone I told I was going to do a barge trip, both French and American, said that it was something they’d always wanted to do.  So, I’ll try to add as much useful info as I can.

Surprisingly, they hand the barge over to you to take away, no boating license or permit required, as if it was a rental car.   And it’s not like driving a rental car.  Our barge, and all the rental barges I saw, were good sized vessels and there is a lot to think about and maneuver.  If you ever do a self-drive, be sure to put someone with some kind of boating experience at the helm.  They do take you out for a quick 15 minute lesson before they’ll let you go, but it’s really a quick lesson.

We chose the famous Canal du Midi for the trip, about three hours away in the Languedoc Roussillon region.  This is the oldest operating canal in France, dating to the 17th century.  It was constructed under Louis XIV as a shortcut trade route between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Reading the manual on the car trip to the port, I zeroed in on how to maneuver a lock.  I was looking forward to seeing how it all worked.  When we arrived at the port, the license plates on the cars were from all over: Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK.  Obviously a destination for European vacationers.

Our barge was big!   I thought we were going to be really cramped, but it was quite spacious.  It slept six, had two shower rooms, two wc’s, a nicely equipped kitchen (you could make anything you wanted to), a dining room, and the whole upper deck with another table and plenty of room to stretch out.  I thought the bed was more comfy than ours back home.  Great boat even though its styling was thoroughly ’80′s.

It wasn’t long before we were upon the first lock.  Locks ingeniously allow water to be contained along the different altitudes of the stretch of the canal.  This direction was to bring us to a lower level on the canal.   You have to maneuver into the lock along with a few other boats.  You’re in kind of a water filled elevator that is operated by two gates on either side which either allow water to come rushing in to fill it up, or allow the water to rush out to lower the water level.  Once the water in the lock is at the level where you’re sailing on to, the gate is opened and off you go.

Our lock master was a young woman.  The gates used to be operated by physically opening them with brute strength applied to a series of gears.  Those are being phased out now by the electric powered versions like we had.

And this is the bucolic setting you’re treated to along your travels.

The canal is no longer used for commercial traffic but there is a good deal of life still.  People live on their barges full or, more usually, part time.  Some villages make “their living” by the tourists barges.

Yippee!  My decades long dream of biking along next to a barge came true that weekend.  So beautiful.  I’m biking along the towing trail.  This is where first men, and then horses, used to pull the barges with ropes.  O – if you ever rent a barge, be sure to rent bikes.  You can go scout the villages, run errands for the boat, and of course, get some exercise in beautiful nature.

I was concerned I wouldn’t keep up with the barge, so I took off like a shot.  Turns out I was going three times as fast as the barge.  So I had plenty of time to ramble.

After a full day of navigating, Pascal figured we had traveled about 35 kilometers.   You can do 35 km in a quarter of an hour in a car.  Amazing.

Maybe it would take this car a little longer.  Sweet scene!

Here’s my nice kitchen.  Gas stove.

Commander Pascal and his deck hand daughters.

All three of us were deck hands.  This is where I hollered to Pascal that I was getting tired of the bike.  He banked the barge and I hopped on (that’s his daugther on the bike, not me.  I’m holding the other rope.).

The entry into my new favorite Langduedoc village: Capestang.  It felt like traveling back in time.  There was a real genuine and kind feel to the place, like you were walking around in 1950′s France.

Sweet architecture.  Nice to see architecture from another region.  And wow, real estate was like way less than half of what you find in Provence.  Got me dreaming.

These filigree balconies were on lots of the buildings.

We did this for a weekend.  Both nights we got lucky and found great little restaurants.  Saturday was in an ancient courtyard in a very popular restaurant run by women.  I noted that it was filled with well heeled tourists.  Sunday evening we ate at a guinguette like the Van Gogh painting above, which are cute nostalgic restaurants you find on riversides and lakesides in France.  They were frequently painted by the impressionists in the 19th ande early 20th centuries.  Great food and great atmosphere.

This guy’s story has to be interesting.

A few details you may be wondering about.  We rented from an outfit called Locaboat.  Google that and barge, Canal du Midi, etc. and you’ll find places to rent.  Reckon that if you fill your boat to capacity, that you’ll pay about 100 € per person per nite.  Not cheap, but not the prices you pay for those fancy barge tours, either.   The staff at the barge rental are very helpful and organized.  Read up on the fascinating history and the region beforehand, bring plenty of reading and writing material, and be sure to taste the local wines: Minervois and Corbieres.   By the way, another neat advantage of the barge trip: as you cruise along the vineyards you’ll see signs for winetastings (dégustation).  Bank your barge and enjoy the local grape nectar.

Email me if you need some help getting your trip together.

Chocolate crossaint points to the first person to translate this phrase from Proust.