so proud of my talented husband.
As well you should be ! Absolutely beautiful, both the photos and lovely gentle music .
It would help if you worked on the sub-titles, there are a lot of typos.
I think those subtitles are auto-generated by YouTube so there’s nothing the originator can do - apart from disable subtitles.
Was he the one singing?
My daughter and her husband went on a visit to the Biltmore Estate yesterday, home of the Vanderbilt family and only half an hour from where they live but as they move again mid Dec, they thought they had better go and see it. It looks very much like the above photo but probably two or three times the size and the photos of the inside already decorated for xmas are amazing, you can certainly the money spent by the family. She said it cost more than Disney to get in as well but worth it to say you have visited the mosst expensive house in the US.
It sounds ghastly. I’d only visit if they paid me!
Not really any different to visiting a National Trust property in the UK except this is a private estate open only certain times and is enormous both in size and acreage. They have a winery there for visitors to taste the products, huge orangery and beautiful gardens laid out in the Versailles style of things. I used to live not far from Waddesdon Manor and that was along the same lines owned by the Rothschild family and based on french architecture.
One day I hope to revisit the chateaux of the Loire that were the itinerary of a tour I took of same.
The person who usually did this tour, living locally, was off sick. Being up with the FR lang, doing battlefield tours in FR and BE, I was asked if I’d do this one. I fancied it, of course but, not knowing the tour or the region I asked for a day at the front end to run round the itinerary, if nothing else to get the spots to park a 16 seater.
They turned the recce down. Very bad mistake. I mugged up the chateaux as best I could in the few days before the tour and spent hours on Google satellite, scoping parking and ‘Way Ins’
We - four couples from the US and one from Aus - set off from Paris to our first o/n at Chartres. Just as we pulled into the town, 5 mins from the hotel, smoke billowed into the bus from the engine compartment. A quick look revealed that the a/c pump main bearing had burned out. I turned off the a/c and we made it to the hotel, coughing lightly.
Next morning I ran the engine for 20 mins with the a/c off. No problems. No smoke. But no a/c.
The party assembled by the bus. I explained that the bus was running fine but there would be no a/c until/unless I could get it fixed. The office in London went into panic mode. The only spare vehicle had just broken down in Cornwall.
One woman, very New Jersey, said, “I’m not getting on that bus! I get asthma. I will choke and die! I want to go back to Paris”. I pointed out the building at the end of the street, with the clock tower. “That’s the rail station. I will drop you there. Trains go to Paris frequently. It’s not far”. She got on the bus.
Ironically, the New Jersey couple, not used to the ways of European a/c and weather, turned the a/c in their room to max. In the morning there was a pool of water on the carpet under the vent and icicles hanging off it. I’d opened my window.
It was a blazing June. The bus not only had enormous picture windows that did not open but two large skylights. Only the driver and ‘codriver’ windows opened. The bus was a sauna in minutes. The pax were in a muck sweat.
First stop, Fontainebleau. It was here that, being asked, I had to admit that I had not done this tour before. Rumbled first thing. Pax sweaty and now not happy.
This went on … When we got to Chinon, it was discovered that the office had switched the hotel booking but not changed the itinerary I was working to. Reception said, “You were here last week. We have you here next week but not today - and we’re full.” Imagine having to go back out and tell a bunch of well-heeled pax paying £1200 p.p for 5 days that …
The hotel managed to find us rooms in a rambling, dog-eared place. Pax now sweaty and very unhappy.
The office couldn’t find a spare bus and it would take at least a whole day out of the tour to get this one fixed - if indeed the parts were to hand. We sweated on.
The next hotel was an upgrade - a chateaux of our own.
Getting the pax back to Paris, the first stop was Gare du Nord, where one couple was taking a train to somewhere faaaar away.
The peripherique was its usual impossible self … ‘un incidente’. Gridlock. We were so late getting to G d N that the pax who had a train to catch missed not only that one but the one after that.
I don’t know if the Aussies made their flight back to Aus but as they were about to head for the terminal at Ch d G the guy gave me a €50 note and said, “I have never felt so sorry for a tour guide in my life.”
You can make and upload your own subtitles - YouTube accepts a variety of formats though it prefers Scenarist Closed Caption (.scc) files.
Video editing programs such as Adobe Premiere Pro allow you to make and export subtitles.
Or at a pinch you can make a basic .SRT subtitle file in any text editor - the caption info looks like this:
1
00:00:00,599 --> 00:00:04,160
>> ALICE: Hi, my name is Alice Miller and this is John Brown
2
00:00:04,160 --> 00:00:06,770
>> JOHN: and we're the owners of Miller Bakery.
3
00:00:06,770 --> 00:00:10,880
>> ALICE: Today we'll be teaching you how to make
our famous chocolate chip cookies!