SATURDAY, 9/10:
The hard part is trying to figure out
where everything goes.
Greetings from the Paris suburb of
Roissy-en-France, where we're ensconced for our final night. More on
Roissy in a bit. First, though, we're trying to repack everything
that we've been using and everything we've picked up during the past
ten days. Some years, it's kind of easy. This year, while it's not
as easy as some, it's still not a challenge. Prior planning on our
part, combined with a bunch of stuff we brought with us that we knew
we'd throw away after the last night, has left us with enough space
and enough of a weight allowance. We just need to figure out what
goes where again, like we did before we left.
Think of it as a strange game of
Tetris, but with chocolate, cereal, and underwear instead of blocks.
We woke up in Bayeux this morning and
went down to the market for one last time...
I had no idea there were that many
colors of tomatoes on the planet. I'm glad Loraine pointed the shot
out to me! The shivering piglet we saw last week wasn't anywhere
insight, but the chickens say “hey”--
Of course, you shouldn't get too
attached to them. They're probably on someone's dinner table even as
I write this.
Remember how I wrote yesterday about
discovering a park we never knew existed in Bayeux? Well, this
morning we discovered a restaurant we never knew existed in Bayeux--
Well, I don't know if I'd call it a
restaurant so much as I'd call it a pizza vending machine. And
that's what it is—you stick your Euros in a slot, you choose what
you want on it, and—voila--three minutes later (or so the machine
says) you get an “artisinal and fresh” pizza. I almost tried
it—after all, I was really curious—but it was only ten in the
morning and we had to get going soon for our trip back to Paris. But
if it wasn't for that, you would've had a Pizza Ninja review.
Really, you would've.
We (sadly) left Bayeux and made the
three-hour tour to Roissy, spending five minutes in a traffic
slowdown near Caen and 15 or so minutes in a typical Parisian traffic
jam. It always seems to happen in the same place, an area where
eight lanes of different freeways converge into two or three lanes of
a single freeway. Add into that the people always trying to cut
through the line or gain a few seconds of an advantage (like a guy in
a Lamborghini trying to switch lanes who almost ran into a guy with a
rusty Renault) and you can always be assured that you'll spend some
time getting to intimately know the license plate of the car ahead of
you.
That's always a joy.
We made it to Roissy, a small town
right on the outskirts of Charles de Gaulle airport,
Roissy's the home of 5,000
hotels rooms and one really cool town park--
Every year Roissy puts up some kind of
huge public art display in the park, so that people who are stuck
here until their flight the next day (like us) have something to look
at. This year, it's on “The Secrets of the D'Oise Valley”, the
area in which Roissy is located. In fact, the picture on this sign
is of a running path in Roissy, covered in cherry blossoms--
Roissy's a really neat place, one in
which we always wander around before leaving for home. Loraine, in
fact, calls it “Our soft place to fall”. We never seem to get to
spend enough time here, which is a shame. But as a goodbye from
Roissy, here's a flower--
I'm gonna cut this a little short
today, as we have to get up at 4:35 tomorrow to start our journey
home. That means we wake up at 10:35 Saturday night Marquette time,
and (hopefully) arrive at Sawyer 22 hours later. However, the Acer
Notebook on which I've been writing all of these is fully charged,
which means that I can use it the entire flight back to Chicago
tomorrow, and post another one of these from O'Hare. And that's a
good thing, because I have a ton of pictures left to post, and
several stories to share, including (but not limited to) the Bayeux
version of “Outback vs. Silverado”, more flowers, more weird
signs, the continuation of a long-standing tradition, the shocking
fact that Mr. Attard is no longer around, and the tale I promised
several days ago about the greatest bromance in French morning
television history.
So until somewhere tomorrow over the
Atlantic...
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