The trip to Paris, Friday and Saturday September 26–27

We’re here! But only some of us. And there’s a new name for the blog. So we’ll start with that part of the story, and then move on.

Just a few days before we were all due to leave, Steve (Sue Anne's sister Aimée’s husband) became quite ill. A series of tentative diagnoses followed, each sounding progressively less severe, until the doctors settled on a relatively benign one. But one that carried with it a restriction on major travel. Silver lining is that the people at Untours responded immediately with all the appropriate changes to the arrangements, plus a partial refund. And Steve and Aimée now get to go to a 9-day ‘fermentation festival’ back home in Wisconsin that they had missed in previous years. It features all sorts of good stuff that arises from processes that involve fermentation—kraut, coffee, chocolate, kefir, kombucha, plus the usual suspects and probably others even less heard of.

That left their son Nate, who was going to be the first one to arrive in Paris due to an earlier flight schedule than Sue Anne and Bruce’s. First trip to Europe and a complicated set of local travel arrangements to get to our AirBnB apartment, but he’s an adventurous sort of guy and up to the challenge. But then an arsonist struck at the air traffic control facility near Chicago. While Nate’s travel plans didn’t involve Chicago, airline routing is so intertwined that the loss of the Chicago activity disrupted other flights through the entire midwest. At first it looked as if he would only lose a day, but that didn’t work out either. Ultimately his participation in the adventure just became infeasible. 

As reported on CNN, the loss of this facility “ . . . has the potential to trigger a line of falling air-traffic dominoes that will ruin travel plans for countless would-be passengers.”

So Sue Anne and Bruce are doing it solo. A few quick emails and we straightened out the arrangements with the AirBnB host, and we were off to Boston to begin the adventure.

New London is nicely served by bus service to Boston every couple of hours, most likely the result of our being directly on the route from Hanover (home of Dartmouth College) and having Colby-Sawyer College in our own town, thereby guaranteeing a good stream of passengers needing to get to/from the big city. WiFi on the bus, which helped in the final sorting out of arrangements. So that got us to the airport, and it also offered a great view of the onset of a beautiful New England autumn. We hear that it’s reached peak in the North Country, but in our part of the state it was still in the transitional phase, offering a joyous mix of colors. We do hope that some remain when we get back home. Usually we prefer to fly from the much more convenient airport in Manchester, but sometimes the arrangements don’t work out, especially for the major routings.

There was crazy rush hour traffic as we approached Boston, but the driver was very skillful and there was plenty of slack in our schedule. 

Easy check-in with Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline. It’s our first experience with them, but that’s where the bargain fare ended up being. They code shared the flight with United, so we added to our ever increasing stock of frequent flier miles (which we began to amass when we used that credit card to pay the kids’ college bills).

Delicious meal at the eponymous Earl of Sandwich outlet at the airport, a pastrami Reuben for Bruce and Jamaican jerk chicken for Sue Anne. Wide body (2-4-2) Airbus A330 with a pretty large and attentive cabin crew. Meal scheduling kind of awkward just due to the timing (depart 9PM, arrive Dublin before breakfast) and no free wine, but all was OK.

Nice views as we flew across Ireland to the airport, which is on the east coast. Yes, Ireland is green. This was the first time either of us had been there. We won’t say ‘set foot in’ because we never left the airport and hence our feet didn’t touch dirt which is what makes it really official, but we did enter Ireland on our Visited Countries map (see link over at the right of the page) despite that minor ethical breach.

Sue Anne’s impression of the green of Ireland, drawn quickly from inside a rather fancy restaurant in expectation of being spotted and thrown out for not being a paying customer. On-location drawing is like that sometimes. And for a major distraction from the scene, she was continuously tempted by a display of chocolate treats passing before her on a moving belt.

[Technical details regarding the drawing: This is the first outing for our little Pandigital portable hand-held wand scanner. You just slide it over the drawing and you’ve captured it, ready to load into the computer. We tested it out at home on last month’s posting of Sue Anne’s art blog, and it did a great job. Its resolution is actually a bit higher than the setting we normally use on our regular flatbed scanner. The scan does of course require cropping and perhaps a bit of color adjustment, but that’s an easy job with our regular software tools.]

Very large international transit area at the airport, with multiple offerings of food and shopping. Breakfast began with a wee sample at the Jameson’s whiskey location, followed by a more traditional repast of coffee and pastry. Then a wander through a large shop of Irish souvenirs, curios, and practical items. Here’s one of the displays of practical items.

Then a two hour flight to Charles De Gaulle airport, north of Paris. Lots of agricultural country down below us, much apparently planted for winter crops. Big airport. Our first encounter with moving walkways that actually went uphill and downhill, in addition to the customary flat. Hold on to the handrail! Some were made of rubber and felt delightfully squishy.

Immigration and customs formalities were barely noticeable, and then it was up to us (and the helpful guy at the information booth) to figure out how to get to the right place in the city. There was good signage too, pretty much all now at least bilingual or even more. France didn’t used to be like that. High speed subway took us directly to Gare du Nord, and then two quick rides on the Métro got us to the neighborhood of our AirBnB apartment, near Place de la Bastille. The steps up from the subway brought us to the wide center strip of the Boulevard Richard Lenoir, originally occupied by a canal and that day hosting a large, weekly art market. A very brief walk and we were at the door to our building.

It did, however, take a bit of mutual coaxing for us to believe that it was our door. It seemed more like the door to a warehouse or an old industrial facility—large, shabby, painted red, made of metal, big enough to drive through. No names, no numbers, but the numbering on some of the nearby buildings seemed to confirm that it could be #16. Then we spotted a brass panel of push buttons next to the door, and the host had armed us with the entry codes. Voilà!  A similar panel led us to the spiral stairway, where we lugged our suitcases up to the 4th floor, at about 20 steps per floor. each step buffed smooth and rounded by the passage of countless shoes over the course of time. And remember, Europeans count floors starting at zero (ground floor).

The building was clearly quite old and had gone through many phases of updating. There were ornate, cast iron panels on each floor that once held the doorbell buttons for the entire floor, and also a communal toilet. We rather suspect that most of the apartments have been upgraded to include their own facilities as has ours, but the toilets in the hallway were fully functional and there are probably still some apartments that rely upon them.

The apartment manager was supposed to meet us at 2:30, but wasn’t able to arrive till 3. We tried to call but couldn’t get our phone to work. It had tested out OK at home, but there was apparently some setup problem with the service here that will require further investigation. But all worked out fine after the knowledgeable and friendly guy appeared.

The apartment is small, but fully functional and pretty much up to date. Bedroom, bathroom with shower, small but well equipped kitchen area, larger living/dining area, and a sleeping loft upstairs. The back wall exposes the building’s actual construction stone, apparently stripped of any previous smooth covering and restored pretty much to original appearance.

A bit of time to rest up and get organized, and then we were off via Métro to a location on the Left Bank for a walking tour of places associated with the WW II occupation of Paris and the French Resistance that we learned about from a list that Aimée had sent us. The major German military presence was on the Right Bank, operating out of commandeered hotels and the like, so the Resistance tended to operate from the other side of the Seine.

The tour lasted from 5 to 7 and entailed a lot of walking, but we were up to it and it probably helped us snap into the new time zone much better than simply racking out at the apartment. The sights along the way were pretty much the normal sights of a very nice part of Paris. Most of the information on the tour came from the narration of what happened at this, that, or the other place along the way, often commemorated with a plaque on the wall. So we haven’t included a lot of pictures of what we saw, but here are a few representative ones.

The tour started in this neighborhood.

Lots of graffiti, much of it well done. This cat also showed up inside a Métro station

Monument to students who participated in the Resistance, some in their early teens.

When one falls, another appears.

Life expectancy in the Resistance was six months.

 We love the ironwork all over the city. 

Good eats too!

 The tour ended with this view of Notre Dame.

It was starting to get dark by the time the tour ended. We stopped for a delightful sandwich meal at a sidewalk place in the area. Love that bread! Then a bit of wandering along the Seine to find the Métro station, and back to the apartment. View of the illuminated column at Place de la Bastille out the window.

Checked email and Facebook, learned that Nate wouldn’t be joining us, and off to bed. Weather had been warm and beautiful, all Paris was out and about, there was a lot of sound coming up from the street, but shutting the window was all it took to create a nice, quiet environment for a good night’s sleep. We’re sure we’ll still exhibit a bit of weariness as the days go on, but we expect that we’ve now surmounted the timezone problem and snapped into the groove.