We have Arrived!

So for those of you that have had absolutely any contact with me over that past year, you've inescapably been droned on to at length regarding this pending trip to France and Spain.

Well, the time has finally arrived! Though rest assured I am taking ample photo and video evidence of this journey, I have decided to live blog this trip. I make no promises to timeliness or consistency, but if you are at all interested in my exploits, stay tuned to this channel, as I'll be updating our sojourn through periodic recitations on both this blog and Facebook.

So, at the time of this writing, it's 6pm Sunday evening (Paris time!). We landed in Paris at roughly 8:30AM after flying for around 10 hours.

My first impressions are that Charles du Gaul airport is a mess, and that no matter how much pre-planning you do, there are ALWAYS hiccups. But the attitude I have taken is to roll with the punches - I actually like navigating bizarre situations in a foreign city in which I don't speak the language ;)

Case in point, the attached photo. We touched down in CDG around 8:30. Our plane was nowhere near a terminal, so we were promptly greeted with a bus on the tarmac, that bussed us to the airport. Getting to the baggage and customs was easy enough, though exceptionally crowded. The actual process to reacquaint ourselves with our luggage took under an hour.

Then the fun began. I had ad nauseum researched the route via the train from the airport to the center of Paris. Our hotel is Hotel Britannique, which is smack in the center of town. We make our way (after about a mile of walking through the airport) to the ticket counter to get a train into the city. Of course, there's a massive construction project going on right now, so the RER B is not accessible from the airport this week. But, fear not!, instructs me somewhat bi-lingual train ticketier - and hands me the above map, with instructions to just ask anyone in a bright red coat what to do if I get lost.

The solution? Walk back across the airport from whence we just came. Hop a subway tram from Terminal 2 to Terminal 3. Find a bus, and take the bus half way across town to another part of the rail line where our RER (the train) intersects with the one we want (took roughly an hour). Finally, once we were on the train, I thought we were in the home stretch! With a rapidly fading Deanna in tow, we exited the train into Chatelet Les Halles... to this point I still don't know how you legally exit the subway, because we were confronted with a byzantine network of exits, the use of which seemingly you need this special card thing of which we don't possess. Finally, sneaking out an emergency exit, and following a bizarre stretch of unmarked escalators, we emerged onto the street level. By this time, I am rather disoriented, but literally use the direction of the sun to navigate us to the Seine (with the occasional stop at a street corner map, and help from an attractive French chick that immediately identified us as Stupid Americans).

Once we're at the river, I am within the territory that I had virtually toured via Google Street View some billion times whilst I should have been working, and knew right where I was - managed to walk straight to the hotel, much to a confused Deanna.

Dropped off the bags around noonish, but check in wasn't until 2pm, so we wandered around Paris for a couple of hours, eventually ducking into a random cafe for some sandwiches and astoundingly good hot chocolate.

Went back to the awesome lobby of our hotel a couple of hours later, but our room was not quite ready, so we literally fell asleep in the lobby while waiting. Finally aroused about half an hour later, and shambled into our room whence we passed out for three hours. Woke up, and wrote this ;)

So the remainder of this evening and all day tomorrow is what time I have left in this gargantuan city. We're gonna go raise some hell for the remainder of the evening, and hopefully begin acclimating to the 9 hour time difference. The three hour nap did us some good.

More as it happens!

Bon Voyage!