Video Diary of an American in France

Here’s the second video of the street entertainment we found in Place Beaubourg in Paris on a warm summer day. Enjoy!

Keeping with our Paris theme, here’s a video of the fun you can find on a warm Summer day in Paris.  We walked to Place Beaubourg to see what street entertainment we could come across. We were lucky because there was plenty of it. Here’s Part One of three parts of the sights and sounds we enjoyed on that day.

Paris In Motion (Part I) by time-lapse and stop-motion photographer Mayeul Akpovi are time-lapse stop-motion videos documenting his trip around Paris. He took over 3,500 photos to make these videos. Google him for more amazing Paris stop-motion videos. Stunning work!

These were taken at our Florida home.

Photos by Cynthia Caughey and Bernard Annet

If you love great blues, you’ll love this.

Two of our favorite activities while in Florida were the Babcock Wilderness Eco-Tour in Punta Gorda and the Sand Sculpting World Championship on Fort Myers Beach. We recommend attending them both but you can visit them in my videos too:

Okay, I admit that Florida is not known for its wines. In fact, it’s hard to believe that they actually produce wine at all. But being the open-minded people we are, we decided to try a couple of wineries. The first is the only winery in the Fort Myers/Naples/Sanibel Island area. It’s called Eden Winery (first video) and, while their vineyards are in the Tampa area now since the local vineyards were wiped out by a hurricane, the tasting room and production is in the Fort Myers area. We did a wine tasting and were actually surprised that they weren’t too bad. Not that great, but not bad either. We even bought a couple of bottles (around $12 each). We also got an education. Apparently, the native vines in Florida are resistant to a fungus that attacks and kills normal grapes which are grown in other parts of the world. However, the Florida grapes do not taste good and can’t be used alone to make wine. So they brought French vines to Florida and grafted them to the Florida vines about 60 years ago. It is these hybrids that are used to make the Florida wines.

The other winery we visited was in Central Florida, the Lakeridge Winery. We took a tour of the production area and winery and we knew we were probably in trouble when we saw massive bags of Domino sugar everywhere (second video). We attended the wine tasting, and frankly, they were some of the worst wines we’ve ever tasted. In fact, I couldn’t take more than the smallest sip and then had to throw it out. The wines actually had a pine sap taste to them, which makes sense since Florida is overrun with Pine trees. See the wine tastings for yourself.