Paris Day Trips: Chartres

My mom and Cathy arrived in Paris on New Year's Day, at the height of holiday tourism. You already know how I feel about crowds of tourists (and how Matt feels about how I feel about tourists), so I was relieved when we decided to leave the city for a day-trip on January 2nd. Our destination was Chartres.

Chartes, population 40,000, is the lovely capital of the Eure-et-Loire department. We ate lunch at a decent restaurant (Café des Arts), checked out the public médiathèque (library for DVDs and CDs), and walked the medieval ramparts. But mostly we were there to see the city's massive cathedral, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site.

There are any number of things that distinguish this cathedral from others in France and throughout the world: the speed with which it was constructed (26 years), its high fidelity to what we think of as the main tenets of Gothic architecture and decoration; the relic it was built to protect (a tunic supposedly worn by the Virgin Mary); its non-matching towers and extant Romanesque façade (above). But one of my favorite parts of the cathedral was its 172 12th- and 13th-century stained-glass windows.

Beautiful, non? Chartres is only an hour-long train ride from Paris (Gare Montparnasse). Tell them I sent you, and don't forget to try the labyrinth . . .