Wednesday, July 29, 2015

France 1 – Mon – Flight and Car

 

So let me start this France blog by saying that we made a painful decision to split the family for the first time ever.  Jane has been suffering from worries, that she verbalizes as anxiety, to the point of not being able to sleep.  This has been going on for the last month or so.  She and medical agreed that she should not go on this trip and introduce environment and time zone changes as we try to get her back to normal rest.  We thought things were getting better, so had lined up a stay with her Nama and the BPs.  But just recently she lost 2 more nights of sleep and that changed the plan.  Kate insisted she stay, and I insisted I stay.  Factoring in as many things as possible, including how the other 3 kids would fare with a single parent.  But ultimately it was Kate saying that she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind off of Jane even if she went on the trip that placed her at home.

The day of departure, Jane wanted to watch all city dive and go to her swim meet, so we dropped her at the BPs and headed out of town.  Kate had done all the trip packing as she always does, but this time I think it was actually therapeutic for her as it gave her something to focus her energy on while we all tried to get Jane back to good rest.  Kate was so fatigued by all the worrying and packing that she gave herself a huge goose egg on her forehead with the driver’s door of the minivan.  I drove to Chicago and thought Kate would sleep, but she stayed up the whole way.  We circled back to the International terminal after first missing it.  With so many nationalities and languages the international terminal is quite the place to people watch, however our line was uncharacteristically short (or maybe it was us being 3 hours early) and we flew through check in without an incident.  Kate’s tears started flowing when she left us at security, giving each of the kids a memento.  Theo a bike zipper pull.  Maeve a jingle bell necklace of the world.  And Zeke a red heart.  Kate left teary eyed after a last group hug.
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I killed some of our 3 hours challenging the kids with some travel questions… why does the trip from Chicago to Paris last overnight while the trip from Paris to Chicago take only a couple hours.  They were both stumped, but Theo realized the time zones were the key.  Then I asked them which flight actually lasts longer?  Again The was the first to figure out that the earth’s rotation plays a part here.  And tried to explain it to Maeve several different ways.  Maeve finally got it when I drew it out on paper.  Showing her that the position of the destination city actually moves during that 7 hours and 40 minutes we were in the air.

Here’s a summary of our day from Maeve…

Hi this is Maeve and I’m going to tell you about our plane ride and car ride. Our plane ride was really long to me but really we slept on the plane and we were there … Paris. We couldn’t just wait we wanted to see my brother Zeke. but we couldn’t find him so we texted him “where are you” Zeke responded “I’m at the car rental, Sixth.” and when we finally found him we were all happy!! so we went to every singal car rental desk to ask if they had our reservasion of the car, they didn’t but the last one we went to said there was another car rental so we went there, they had the reservasion. then we were off and the journey of finding the “hotel” we were staying at for 2 nights.

me again… nice summary from Maeve.  I’ll fill in some of the gaps and correct a few errors, but am going to leave the spelling errors as is.

None of us slept much.  Maeve slept perhaps 3 hours, Theo perhaps 1 hour and I perhaps 30 minutes.  It’s just hard to get comfortable in those seats and despite us having 3 seats in a row, the middle arm rest would not fold up.

Theo and I and our 4th seat middle row travel mate were nervous when the empty row in front of us filled with a baby, 2 toddlers and an overwhelmed mom (obviously so when the attendant has to carry the baby in for you).  But they did surprisingly well overnight… not a peep.  Theo said it was the electronics, and that may be true of the toddlers, but the baby did not play.  We saw only some bad behavior as the one toddler kept trying to incite play from Maeve by stealing things off her food tray.

We landed, and after a long bus ride off the runway, we arrived at customs.  Despite reminding them to hit the bathroom on the plane, they both used the bathroom before immediately before customs, as I watched the line grow and grow.  As the man behind me in line pointed out, they had only one window open, which actually closed down at one point because someone walked straight through without getting cleared at the window.  Eventually we made it through and I turned my attention more fully to finding Zeke.  We’d already text messaged (which was a relief to me as I wasn’t sure I was completely setup for international calling yet).  So I knew he was arriving and would be waiting for us after we cleared our line.  I told him to head to car rental and start asking the desks if they had a reservation for us as I’d forgotten to print out our car reservation.  I headed for the car rental too… assuming there was only 1.  Ours was in lock down from the police with machine guns.  Uh-oh.  Now I hoped there was a second one.  I texted Zeke, who said he was in 2f.  We were in 2e.  Great luck. We found him and the kiddos ran up and gave him a hug.  I gave him a huge hug too after I got a few photo ops.

Stopped at the Paris-Stde soccer stadium hoping for some quick and easy street parking.  Found one, but couldn’t get the car into reverse and ultimately had to pull past the spot as a large truck was waiting patiently on me.  Theo actually figured it out for me.. instead of pushing down you had to pull up.  Found a Quick (literally) burger joint that had you order at a kiosk.  All the kids took a turn at the kiosk and when my turn came up I was guided by all of them at once… We tried paying several times but ultimately failed and had to go to the counter.  After some confusion over why we were at the counter, we realized the other very long lines must have been for ordering or waiting on the orders and that the only french speaking attendant wanted us to pay.  I slid the card through the normal way, but he showed me how to hold it below the scanner (found out later at the gas station, that my new card had a security chip that was used instead of the magnetic strip in all of France).  Our food literally came out as soon as we paid… evidently we’d taken much longer ordering at the kiosk than we thought.  Zeke said over and over again how good it was to have a burger… even a bad burger.
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I was thinking the drive would be straightforward with the GPS we got and were able to reset to english.  It reported a toll booth route at 4:20 and a nontoll route at 5:40.  We decided to pay the tolls.  The french have beautiful large signage for all of their historic and interesting sites.  I couldn’t help myself but to pull into this castle site just off the highway.  Maeve and Theo were sleeping but Zeke walked up with me.  This is a view from the side of the castle out toward the front across the moat bridge.
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At some point the GPS told me about a road out of order and asked if I wanted to take the alternate route… I trusted it but shouldn’t have.  About 5 hours into the trip I realized it had taken me way off path.  INstead of Brittany, we were up North in Normandy seeing signs for Utah beach!  I bypassed the road out of order message from the GPS and reset our course at about an hour 30 remaining.  We arrived way later than we should have, but still had time to throw our things into the house and walk down to the beach only 1.5 blocks away.  It was plenty cold enough and both Theo and Maeve stayed out of the water… but enjoyed collecting shells.

That night we drove out to find supper and ran into a pizza place on the road above the opposite west-facing beach.  The kids all liked their american food. Maeve laughing and Theo pretended to be aghast to see the name brand of his lemonade (which everyone said, despite the name, was actually very very good).
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One final story…
I am feeling so embarrassed to not be able to speak a bit of french.  Even the french I know… mercy (thank you) seems to be something they say and then I’m left with nothing I can reply… so I fnally asked the waitress (owner?) what one says as ‘you’re welcome’.  Her english was minimal and despite understanding me, she didn’t know.  So she asked a regular patron who was kind enough to attempt a french lesson.  He explained you wouldn’t say you’re welcome, which means welcome to my home.  But might say it’s nothing… like Spanish de nada.  And tried to give us the pronunciation.  Despite several attempts by me and one by Zeke we couldn’t get it right.  We laughed and hopefully eased his frustration as he threw up his hands.  And Zeke threw out a quick Merci as we left (smart… get the Merci in first before you are put in the position of having to answer… that will be my new strategy!).  On the way home we just laughed about the phrase, whihc to all of our American ears appeared to be something like Merci beau coup (some other word) followed by ‘I kill you’.

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