Paris final weekend

Saturday I was able to relax a bit, though I did have the strength & discipline to attack the papers half-heartedly, and do miscellaneous paperwork. I decided not to activate my 2-day museum pass, since it's good for another year, and enjoy the luxury of staying closer to home. In the evening I Metro'd out to the Bois de Vincennes to do a run, something I'd never done before, and that was a pleasure despite the oddity of being on the Metro in running togs (on the way back the train was mercifully not as crowded and I sat at the back of the rearmost train so as not to scare the children with my prodigious sweat).

Sunday was more of a social day: I had a 2-hour lunch and yak-a-thon at a Thai fusion place on the Boulevard Montparnasse with Amelie's old friend Yvonne and her son Olivier (A's piano student when Yvonne and her partner did a house swap with A's parents back in the 1980s). Yvonne was fluttering a little more than usual, with events surrounding the release of her latest novel.

Since Yvonne and Roger had lived in the Inverness house, I brought my laptop to show them the pictures of the work that had been done and the arrangements that had been made for the wedding of Jesse (Amelie's friend Claudia's daughter) and Kevin that I'd done in May. As usual, it was great to catch up in the easy mixture of French and English that we tend to speak, depending on the grammatical thickets I find myself in.

I didn't get in a run, in part because I met my colleague Raquel for a drink over at a café on the Boulevard St Germain near where she is living, and caught up with her. She is having a tough time for herself, running this program on her own after having done it many times with her late husband Marc, who died last fall of cancer. Big ouch.

Then it was back to the Citadines to prepare for the pre-transfer meeting in the salle-de-reunion of the hotel, trying to prepare the ducklings for Monday, what in some ways is the most involved travel day of the trip: getting to the Gare de Lyon after checkout, activating Eurailpasses, validating reservations for Bellegarde, train to Bellegarde, train to St Gervais after a 2 hour layover (ugh), train to Les Houches, walk to the hotel while the baggage goes by taxi. Noooo problem.

There's an amazing amount of little stuff involved in ensuring things go well, such as what I did early on the morning of the trip, and was glad I did: I put on running shorts and did the bus from Montparnasse myself, and discovered that the automatic announcements stopped at Austerlitz, for some reason having to do with GPS coverage perhaps; at least I could warn them that their stop would (probably) not be announced! Then I ran back from the Gare de Lyon, along the river and back to Luxembourg, thereby doing my scouting AND getting a workout in before our big day. Of course, my morning packing was interrupted by people wanting to leave far earlier than I had said, which was a nice test of patience, but I did get my hasty breakfast before checking groups of four people at a time (each with a cell phone) out of the lobby and then getting on my way myself.


All in all, it went fine: we found a good place to assemble, in the hall away from the trains, with A/C, without crowds, which was good, because the kids were so paranoid that their teams of 4, each with a cell phone, were actually all out of the Citadines lobby ten minutes before my target time, and our train was a little late in departing. Felt sort of stupid to wait in long lines to validate Eurails (each taking 10 seconds), but too many Gallic shrugs told me that was the only way to do it. Such are the joys of traveling during the high season. I wish I had gotten a photo inside the train, but the ones on the platform at Bellegarde will have to do.