PARIS!

PARIS!
Saturday 6/26/2010

So, it's now 11 am, Saturday, and I'm sitting in the comfortable, old lobby of our Hotel de la Bourdonnais in Paris. We get free a Wifi Internet connection, so communication is easier from my laptop, although a secure connection to our bank to check balances is uncomfortable, because I'm a little concerned about someone seeing our passwords and account numbers.
We got here to the hotel about 11 pm last night after arriving in Paris on the high speed train from Nice, France about 9 pm.

The magazine in the seat pockets of the train said it traveled at 320 kph (and the staff on the train confirmed that). The Internet when we bought the tickets said it traveled at 185 mph. I'm sitting in the lobby with a gentleman named Steve who currently lives in Portland, and we visited. He works with lasers in Portland, and since he's a scientific guy so I asked about the kph translation to mph. He says 320 kph would be about 192 mph. It was amazingly fast watching things go by, but it was very smooth (glasses and dinner was on the table in front of us on the high-speed train, and nothing fell off until the water bottle was empty, and then it fell off).

Further visiting with Steve, here in the lobby in Paris, he grew up in Missoula, Montana (where I grew up from 1966 until 1984). We both went to Rattlesnake Grade School, and to Hellgate High School, (I graduated from high school in 1973, and he graduated high school in 1981). So far we haven't been able to connect any more common names that both he knew and I knew. He lived on Aspen Drive up the Rattlesnake, which is the road where some of my good childhood friends, like Allen Janes and Ken Weber lived, but he didn't know them.

(Note: I make reference to places often in these writings to try to be clear to the reader, and to myself for record-keeping).

Our family was scheduled to leave Nice yesterday about 3:30 pm (and if we left at that time we would have had 7 minutes to transfer between trains in Toulon, France). The clerk at the train ticket window in Nice, France said in broken English something about rain, and water over the tracks, and that our schedule wouldn't work and so we could leave on an earlier train at 2:30 instead of 3:30. (Someone is watching out for us!). So we left Nice an hour earlier @ 2:30, and the staff on the train said, in very poor English (after we pulled out of the station), that we should not get off in Toulon, but instead we should go further and get off in Marselles, France to transfer to the high speed train to Paris (Arrrrggggh!) This made us very anxious, but they were right, AND we barely had time to transfer from the Nice-Marselles train to the high-speed Marcelles-Paris train. (More blessings in disguise).

And I believe if we had kept to the original plan of doing the whole trip from Vernazza, Italy to Genoa, Italy to Ventimiglia, Italy to Nice, France, to Paris, France on Friday, we wouldn't have made it. Turns we were exhausted when we arrived in Paris, anyway.

So now we have 5 days and 6 nights in Paris before we get on a plane to London.
Josh is going crazy, because the rock band, Green Day, is playing a concert tonight, and he really wants to go. More later on that ...

Todd