What a great birthday weekend for the Bride! We left home on Friday morning took a taxi to the station and caught our train to Fenchurch Street. Then by Tube across to Waterloo and the Eurostar departure. Excellent security in place (who wants a bomb in the Chunnel?) and then off we went. Non stop to Paris. Once clear of the suburbs, we were soon hurling along at 170 MPH - and it was fascinating to be parallelling Motorways seeing the poor old BMWs and Mercs crawling along at 80! The Chunnel was duly announced and after awhile a "Welcome to France". Gare du Nord was our termination point and , as we had already bought Metro passes while waiting in Waterloo, we went straight to the Metro and Pasteur(the station beside our Hotel of 13 years a go --The Camellia).
All this time poor old Len had been battling with a cold which Carol had carelessly thrown his way -packets of tissues were quickly consumed, handkerchiefs reduced to unmentionables and a desire for early death became apparent. Nonetheless he soldiered on, trudged valiantly around Montparnesse, managed a few Sushi and Sashami, easily swallowed a few wines and collapsed into bed. The Camellia was little changed from our previous visit, the en suite was still of Lilliputian proportions, but the toilet no longer required a reversed attitude withdrawal.!!
Breakfast at the local cafe - coffee/bread/croissant (breakfast??)- and then off to see the City and meet up with Sarah who was flying in from Stavanger. Believe it or not, Carol found a shoe shop where she managed to buy two pair of shoes to add to the Marcos like collection. It was at this point that we were the subjects of what I am sure was a scam.
As we walked along the footpath, a young girl bent down in front of me and picked up a gold ring (now I THINK I saw it on the ground as she picked it up). Ole! she cried and showed us the ring with obvious delight. My lucky day she said. Carol asked her where she came from and was told Kosova - but now living in Paris without work. She tried the ring on her finger and said it was a man's ring and promptly gave it to me to try where it fitted of course. I took it off to give her back but NO NO it is your lucky day was the reply! Sadly she had no job/no place to live/no money for food so CEJ opened her purse and poured out the few bits and piece of change in Euros - all told about 2 Euros. Not enough to assuage her hunger - so LJMJ delves into the back pocket and came up with a 10 Euro note - and Bingo - all smiles - all have had a lucky day. Now I can't wait to take the ring into a jeweller and see whether the inscribed 18kt mark is fair dinkum!!
Anyway it passed a bit of time until we met Sarah off the airport bus at L'Opera. She was late as her plane was delayed in Stavanger - but she looked absolutely terrific when she finally arrived. We went back to the Hotel where she was also booked in, and as we had already booked a bus tour that night to see "The Illuminations" starting at 9.30 pm, Len sent the girls off to reluctantly shop on their own while he inspected the insides of his eyelids!! When they returned some 3 hours later Father was enjoying a red wine at the footpath Cafe nextdoor to the Hotel.C'est la vie.
The birthday dinner was a great success. Our Hotel concierge had recommended that we walk up to Montparnesse where there were some excellent restaurants, And we found one.Wonderful food with a nice bottle of wine, lovely ambience and not over the top pricewise. And then it started to rain -les Pussies and Bow Wows both.
Undeterred we took off for the Metro and the Station from where we could catch our Bus tour. Fortunately a late night shop was flogging umbrellas - so we bought a couple to keep the worst of the rain away.The double decker bus had an open top deck to enhance viewing opportunities but of little interest in the pouring rain. So off we went with rain dropped and steamed up windows happily listening to the commentary on what was being passed if we had only had the chance of seeing it!! The Eiffel Tower featured strongly from several angles but it really was pretty hopeless - and then Bingo - the Bus hit a car -right on a roundabout!
We sat there for 40 minutes while notes were made of the prang. It didn't look very serious although our driver manfully hauled the front bumper bar from the bus and stored it at the back of the upper deck. It had now stopped raining and so we were able to get up on the open deck and watch proceedings. Nothing was said to anyone about the tour - but finally we started off again and seemed to retrace our steps. Some of the passengers had apparently included a visit to The Moulin Rouge and we stopped in there for a while with lights and confusion everywhere. I remember seeing the Opera Hourse on at least three occasions - and then we finished up on the Champs Elysee in traffic nightmare and wondering if we would be back at that bus depot in time to catch a late Metro back to Pasteur. The tour guides were useless and made no attempt ot apologise for the disaster of an evening.
We finally got back to the hotel at 12.40am -and all agreed it had been a most interesting day!!! More on the next Blog
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