After months of planning, years of dreaming we finally left our house and we made it to the first travel stop, Paris! Our front door to the hotel front door took 22 hours. It takes some time to sink in that we actually landed in France.
CDG airport is pretty far from the downtown train station from which we leave tomorrow for St. Jean Pied de Port. We had it all planned how to get from the airport to Paris taking the RER to the subway. Then we found at the airport giant signs saying “train not running” take the bus at gate 2F. Ok, except the bus doesn’t go downtown it goes to another train station. At CDG there was a very nice SNCF agent that explained it all. Good thing Janice was there because I heard about 10% of what he said. Take a bus, blah blah, take a train, blah blah, take the subway, blah blah. I missed the part about how the 20 euro ticket was good for the whole trip but Janice caught that part and half the blah blahs. At each new transition I thought I needed to buy another ticket!
Anyway – past travel experience kicked in, asking a few more SNCF agents helped and somehow it all worked out. But it was kind of fun and and crazy too.
CDG is a huge airport. We found a corner to unpack the throw away suitcase and move everything to the backpacks. Getting rid of the suitcase was kind of funny. There was a homeless guy and I asked him if he wanted it. He nodded so I left it with him but shortly later we noticed he left it unattended in the airport – unattended bag in the airport, never good! So we retrieved the suitcase and asked a very nice policeman where lost luggage was and took the suitcase there. They seemed happy to get it – go figure.
We had great plans for tonight in Paris but we were exhausted. We fell asleep in the room around 8:30pm watching French dubbed American TV shows. We woke up refreshed noticing it was still dark outside, looked at the clock – 10pm!!! Oh well let’s go to the Eiffel tower.
