2018: Bring it on! (Bordeaux) 1/1/2018

Happy New Year to All –

We slept late and had our usual breakfast, packed, and then sat in one of the sitting areas of the hotel – working. Guess reality and getting back to the grind is setting in. I generally work throughout our travels (a little each day), but on this trip I worked more in “batches” and somehow didn’t finish everything I brought to do… so I think the flight home will be like setting up an office on the plane. It’s fine, not complaining. Yndo prepared a light lunch for us – vegetable soup and salad and a gluten-free lemon loaf. Quite good and I’m neither gluten-free nor vegan.

We are off to Paris for the night – staying in that new Yotel (which looks like the bed takes up the entire room) – a chain that has developed with very small rooms but the hotels are located right inside the airport. Should be interesting. We booked the largest room, which is still microscopic. Not sure where you put your bags in that room. But it’s just for a few hours.. We head back to California tomorrow morning (Tuesday) – and I head to Seattle on Wednesday. The goal is to drop off the bags and meet friends for dinner (they made reservations at L’Arpege which is fantastic), but we shall see if the weather holds up and our plane is actually on time – a necessity if we are to make the dinner. If not, I think it will be airport food (guess if you have to have airport food, Paris airport food is probably better than most.)

Right now they are predicting stormy weather and lots of rain. We are keeping our fingers crossed it blows over.

See most of you stateside.

Be well – Here’s to a healthy, peaceful, and tweet-free 2018 (but I can see on my phone that this is already not possible).

Farewell to Bordeaux… we shall return.

Fern

PS – Landed in Paris; no bus from plane to terminal; long wait. Then baggage at far end and exit at total opposite end of baggage area; always forget that Charles de Gaulle is a big airport. Then as we started to walk (hike) to the Yotel, we checked the information online for the route and started to read all the information. Turns out Yotel is inside the secure area, so you need to either check your baggage or else put it into a storage area at the other end of the terminal. Our bags are fairly small so we could probably get through security with them as carry-on, but would require a bit of re-organizing that we had not planned and we’d need to figure out a few things regarding liquids, since we purchased a few things. Anyway, decided that Yotel would not work for us; so we headed to the CDG Sheraton, where we had stayed once before when we had a connecting flight early the next morning. But by the time we reached the Sheraton it was about 9:15 and the reservations at L’Arpege were at 9:30. We still needed to check in and get bags to the room and then either hop in a taxi or take the train. Was not looking good. We figured it made sense to cancel the dinner plans and just eat at the Sheraton (not the final French meal we had imagined… but we’ve had great meals for the past 16 days – and already eaten way more than we wanted). All good; flight leaves in the morning. Change planes in Chicago (praying for no blizzard) and then in San Francisco at 6:30  pm tomorrow (Tuesday).