A productive, satisfying and sunny day!

Today is John’s 80th birthday!! He is a no fuss person, and they have had family celebrations before they left, but we want to make things good for him today…! They both had a good sleep last night, and felt ready to take on the world this morning. But our first decision was what to do about the strike on Thursday, which is the day we have tickets on the TGV down to Bayonne. The media remains silent, but we and everyone knows Thursday will be a chaos day when nothing is working, so we decided to go to the ticket office at Montparnasse station and try to swap to Wednesday. We tried online with no success, so stood in line and waited for ages with a numbered ticket (like sitting in a Medicare or Centrelink office waiting your turn)…While waiting, Amr was bored as he could get no reception on his phone (even though I could on mine!) so he started fiddling on the self serve computers in the room, and put our booking number in and got our journey and names etc up, and requested a change and managed to find a train on Wednesday, leaving at 10am which is perfect, and swapped us on to that!! There were many trains that were “complet”, so very lucky! And the machine printed out new tickets, and no charge!!! So he quickly did the same for Carole and John, and we are even sitting next to each other!! That was the train to Bordeaux…we had separate tickets from Bordeaux to Bayonne, not a TGV (that was the best we could find when we originally booked) and couldn’t get the machine to do that, but by then our number was finally called and a very nice man organised the last leg for us, and we are set to leave Paris before everything shuts down - metro, trains, buses…phew! And we are so happy to have an extra day in Bayonne, and we have organised the extra night with the hotel there…so happy, and relieved, as Easter was going to be complicated anyway…Amr gets huge accolades for making that big change ….!

So with light hearts we set off to enjoy Paris, a beautiful sunny day - cool but gorgeous. Got the metro back to St Michel area had a little refreshment at a cafe, and walked round Notre Dame, still so much work to do, but they are faithfully and meticulously restoring the beautiful cathedral. Then we walked back a little along that end of rue de Rivoli near Les Halles and went to book Chez Denise for dinner tomorrow night…all they could offer was 10.30 pm!! And tonight totally booked, so we changed plan and got a booking for tomorrow lunch at 2pm…perfect…John and I just love their menu as among many other yum things they have tripe, liver, kidneys!!! So we will be happy.

Another stop for refreshment (actually I had an onion soup, felt hungry) but the others had drinks…Then we kept walking along the streets, got the metro back to Bastille and walked along the raised walkway we had discovered last time in October 2021…it goes for about 4 kms from Bastille to Bois de Vincennes, and so pretty…it was lovely in autumn, and equally gorgeous in spring - so different, the leaves just appearing, and the fruit blossoms out.

Now back at the hotel for R and R, dinner at another local bistro across the road at 7.30.

…back from dinner. Really good. We started with a cheese and charcuterie board, then Amr and John had a gravelax dish and Carole and I had scallops with carrots and an orange sauce…delicious, but SO many carrots!!! Even Ted would be stumped I think! I did quite a good job and almost finished them, with a bit of help from Amr! Altogether a great day.Read more