Nous sommes arrivees a Paris….

We are finally here, after a long, long, long trip.  It seems a bit unreal.  As I told Suzie, I don’t think it will really hit me for a week or so.

Our trip began yesterday in Greenisland, where after finishing our cleaning of our house, we made our way to the Greenisland railroad station with an ungodly amount of baggage.  They were doing work on the station, so we had to cart all of this mass a long, long way up to the platform.

From there, we were supposed to have a 25 minute train ride to the main station in Belfast, where we would catch a bus to Dublin Airport. Unfortunately, to do that we had to transfer, and the transfer time of 4 minutes was not enough to allow us to haul the mass of baggage from one platform to another in that time (hampered, I might add, by the fact that the transfer requiring using an elevator that was the size of a bachelor pad closet). About the time we got to the right platform, the train pulled away, and the next train to where we needed to go was, of course, to arrive on the same platform we had originally arrived on, which meant hauling all the baggage back into the tiny elevator and back to the same place we’d started.

By the time we reached the main station, we’d missed the bus, and had to wait an additional 20 minutes for the next one, which gave us time to score a latte and have a discussion with a young girl sitting next to us who had emigrated from South Africa to Ireland.

The bus arrived and departed on time, and the trip to the airport was uneventful, save for the fact that it did not have a bathroom on board, much to the consternation and anguish of my younger son Andrew.

The rest of the afternoon and evening went well, allowing for the ever-present rain. The hotel I’d picked from Expedia near the airport (it is called the Orchard Inn) was fabulous — modern, clean, quiet, with everything in the room you’d want. We walked to a nearby village called Swords and ate in a faux-American diner (because we were starving and it was the first place we came to, more or less), and the food was excellent. We had a little trouble getting to sleep, and the alarm going off at 4 a.m. was unpleasant, but the trip from the hotel to the airport, and getting on the plane at the airport, was easy … everyone was friendly and helpful, and by pure blind dumb luck, we were seated in an exit row, which meant that I didn’t have to spend the flight wondering if my knees would be crushed by the person ahead of me deciding to recline their seat. (Actually, in front of us were a group of four young Irish girls on their way to San Francisco; they chirped like excited birds [Suzie’s metaphor, not mine] the whole trip, but I found their enthusiasm refreshing. And they never reclined their seats.)

In London our layover was 3.5 hours, so we had lots of time to check out the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow, a much-needed improvement.

As chance would have it, I ended up accidentally bumping into a gentlemen named Niko Androniko, who, it turned out, resided in Sonoma and owned property in Kenwood for a number of years, and whose uncle started (and whose relatives still own) the Andronico’s supermarkets in Berkeley, where my father-in-law frequently shops. A gregarious man, he was returning from a long stay in Greece, where he still has family. At one point he mentioned the he had been stationed in the late 1950s at Wheelus Air Force Base. Readers may ask, so what? The ‘what’ is that my father was also stationed at Wheelus, which was located close to Tripoli, Libya, from 1959 to 1963, along with his family, including his young son Steven, who graduated from kindergarten there and spent his first years in the educational system learning about Libyan money and a few Libyan phrases. To randomly find someone with so many connections, totally accidentally, in an odd place, is one of the reasons I love to travel.

Our flight to Paris was delayed, and we hit terrible turbulence en route, which scared the bejeezus out of Suzie. Our wait for our baggage was long, our wait for our shuttle driver was long, the trip from the airport to our place was very long, and we arrived at the front of 91 Avenue du General Leclerc feeling happy but exhausted.

Suzie rang the gardienne (like a building superintendent in the states), who let us in and informed us that there was a problem. Our minds went, oh, what now, but the problem was (in the scheme of things) minor: The elevator was broken. This meant that we had to haul the ridiculous amount of baggage we had up to the 6th floor. Good exercise, like an involuntary stairmaster workout.

Our place is great, in an old building, with high, high ceilings, ornate plaster ornamentation (is that redundant?), two small balconies, accessed by a spiral wooden staircase covered in a classic running strip of more-or-less red carpet.  The neighborhood is active and seems very safe. After unpacking, we went out and had dinner at a nearby brasserie, did some grocery and baguette/pastry shopping (two great bakeries are within a quarter-block of our door), set up the internet connection, checked e-mail, blogged, and am now ready to call it a long, long day.

Note: There is some problem uploading pictures today, so that will have to wait until morning. [Update — They’re here now!]