Friday morning we woke very early (well 6:30 anyway), dressed, breakfasted and trundled down to City Centre and the Broad Quay (one of the thirty or so bus stops at the City Centre. We found a very nice British couple waiting for the same bus to take them to Italy. The bus was due to pick us up at 8:30, but by 8:35 we started to think we might be in trouble. We waited until 8:45 and then they pulled out their "mobile" (Brit for cell phone) and called the tour company. The tour company confirmed that we had been left behind because we were at the wrong bus stop. We weren't. Then the race began. We were instructed to get a cab (at their expense) and get to the next stop on the bus' route, Gordano. We had no idea where that was, but assumed somewhere towards London.
The four of us, with bags in tow, searched the City Centre for a cab, during morning rush hour. We remembered a cabstand nearby - room for six cabs - but on reading the fine print we found that this particular taxi stand was only in use from 8:00PM until 6:00AM. After a frantic "Easter Egg" hunt and asking a few people we found the daytime taxi stand. There were no taxis waiting.
Somehow an ambitious driver from across the square spotted us and taking his life into his own hands, "U-turned" acrossed six lanes of rush hour traffic to pick us up. Once our luggage and the four of us had piled into the cab, the cabby crossed the square and headed WEST - passing our flat. It turns out that Gordano is a "rest stop" on the M5 motorway. The driver delivered us to this huge parking lot, next to a gas station-restaurant complex, with a number of tour buses from various companies. Four of the buses were from our company.
Once we caught our breath and found out how things were organized we discovered several things. All the "Majestic" buses in the parking lot had picked up passengers in the Southwest of England and were "re-shuffling" them at Gordano. The other couple we met in Bristol was headed to Italy on a different bus. And, we had a forty-five minute wait until we really left.
The M5 freeway is well known to us. We had several adventures with B&P on this road on our way to Wales. At the intersection of the M4 and M5 we switched to the M4, heading east, and once past Bristol we were on new road. The trip into London was easy and straightforward although I am still amazed at how much open land there is in England - mostly small farms and woodlands. Just before London we switched to the M25, the ring road around London proper. The M25 skirts Heathrow and even though it lies fairly close to London, it is quite rural. The driver joked that the M25 was one of England's biggest parking lots but the good news was that there was no fee.
About this time the drivers (there were two of them, Paul and Dave) received news that there had been an accident on the M25 a couple of miles ahead of us. As expected, the traffic started to thicken but we were optimistic. The drivers started to worry about the slow down and took the next off ramp. After sampling the local traffic for a couple of blocks - they made a u-turn and hopped back on the freeway - maybe the slow down wasn't so bad. And then the freeway stopped. We waited in line for a half an hour or so and found that all the traffic was being diverted off the freeway onto surface streets. In England, a traffic accident with a fatality is treated like a murder and requires a full forensic work-up. And, the freeway has to be resurfaced! (This is not confirmed by Jerry.) What a headache. (This has been confirmed by Jerry.)
The drivers were frantically working with their map and most alert driving skills as they tried to work us through the resulting traffic jam. At one point they even stopped and asked directions. The good news was they we were given a very nice tour through the back-roads of Surrey, one of the better, upper-middle class neighborhoods. We had figured we wouldn't get to see that area, so this was an added bonus for us. The bad news was that we missed our Chunnel appointment.
At this point it might be appropriate to tell you a little about the bus. The tour bus was a land yacht. The airline type seats were adjustable and reasonably spaced. The bus was fully air-conditioned and equipped with a bathroom. The bathroom was in the middle of the bus and down a fight of stairs - how they found room for a bathroom in the basement is a complete mystery - very clever design. There was a bar on board, but it didn't serve any liquor - you could get tea, cappuccino, hot chocolate, orange juice, soup or bottled water at reasonable prices. So, during this whole ordeal we did not want for any creature comforts. We did experience tired butts.
We cruised along parallel to the M25, at about 2-3 miles per hour, until we cleared the accident or they got it under control - we may never know which. All in all, we lost 5 hours off our schedule. This meant that we missed our 3:08 PM appointment at the "Chunnel" (English Channel Tunnel) and the dinner the tour company had arranged at the hotel, since we would normally have arrived fairly late in the evening
By this time it was dark and the freeway to Paris was pitch dark. There were no streetlights, no house lights and no freeway lights for the next two and a half hours. Northwest France is very rural. The distance from Calais to Paris is about the same as the distance from the Chunnel to Bristol. So, it took four to five hours to drive to Paris.
We arrived at our hotel in Paris at about 2:00 AM. To compensate for the late arrival the drivers allowed an extra half hour sleep before starting the Paris tour in the morning. The strange thing was that everyone was on time or early for the trip. Although the day's trip on Friday was long, it wasn't physically strenuous and we were all eager to see Paris.
I had expected Paris to be a little shabby, old and a little dirty. It was none of these things. The city was clean, fairly modern, lots of white, and light colors with wide, tree-lined streets. We had received lots of advice on "bad neighborhoods" and parts of town to avoid, but of what we saw we had no complaints. In Dan Brown's novel, The DaVinci Code he described a trip though the "Bois de Boulogne" park in lurid terms. As we left the freeway in Paris on our first night, our first landmark was this very same park and there were no people of any kind. Our hotel was in a neighborhood called St. Cloud ? it was very clean and prosperous, mostly flats (in American that would be Apartments).
St Cloud is to the west of Paris. Upon entering the city center the first landmark we saw was the "Arc de Triomphe." Not only is the "Arc" an impressive monument, it has to be one of the largest "roundabouts" in the world. From the time we landed at Calais it was obvious that the traffic rules had changed (for one thing we changed sides of the road, and the traffic circles changed from clockwise to counter-clockwise). But, one of the significant differences became apparent as we entered the roundabout at the Arc. The traffic entering the circle has the right-of-way. This makes it easy to get in and hard to get out. Later we found that the freeways also favor the cars coming onto the freeway. The rightmost lane is known locally as the "suicide lane" because no matter the speed of the merging car - you have to yield (little old ladies rule).
With the river as a landmark we were able to start to make a sense of order out of what we were seeing. The tour company had reserved space on one of the tour boats and we were able to board without a problem. The tour boats are very large and designed for this particular purpose. There was seating available for hundreds of passengers and each seat had a hand-held speaker that could be programmed to the language of your choice. The speakers gave a running dialogue of the sights on the banks and were very nice. We cruised up the river, passed the island that held Notre Dame and then turned around and cruised back. The island was the original city of Paris. The trip took about an hour.
The other problem wasn't so easy. It was getting warm. At first I thought it was just me, but it soon became apparent that the day was destined to be quite warm. For the next two days most of our activities and decisions were based on the heat. Paris, for the two days, was hotter that it had been on this date for at least the last ten years with temperatures pushing the mid-90°s F.
The tour company had planned the day so that now that we had gotten an overview, we were free to spend the next few hours exploring those areas that interested us most. The bus took us onto a small side street where other buses were doing the same thing - letting their passengers wander around and they come back to the bus at the appointed time.
The problem was we didn't know for sure where we were and we certainly didn't know were to go to find a nice café. We found several sidewalk cafes, but they looked out on heavy traffic - no charm in that. We wandered around for a while, getting hotter and not finding anyplace "pleasant" and finally settled for some place shady. We were not very far from the place that we were to meet the bus and found a street vendor that sold bottled water and ice cream and waited. After a while we looked around and found several fellow passengers shared our shade. When the three hours were up, we were happy to slip into the air-conditioned bus, get another bottle of water, and head back to the hotel for a rest before dinner. The hotel wasn't air-conditioned but at least we had lots of water for a shower.
The program proposed by the tour company suggested that we would be taken into the city and allowed to entertain ourselves and then picked up three hours later. The reality was that the drivers (or maybe the company) had a dinner and a restaurant selected that we could sign up for. Saturday night we chose to go with everybody else to the restaurant. It was a good choice. By now everyone on the bus was recognizable and having shared common problems we were ready to party.
The dinner restaurant picked was a French restaurant in the "Latin Quarter". The menu advertised a four-course meal with five choices of "starter," five of the main course and five deserts. A cheese course between the main course and the desert was the same for all. In addition, there was an unlimited supply of wine, beer or soft drink and there was live entertainment. An accordion and a guitar seem to be the standard for French entertainers.
Everyone got on very well at dinner and with the music and wine, I would have to admit that we all got a little rowdy. When we were finally left about 11:30 and returned to the bus, the Latin Quarter was jammed with people. The evening had been quite pleasant.
For Sunday the tour group had three different choices: a trip to Versailles, a visit to Monet's garden, or a trip to Disneyland. Most picked Versailles. The hotel stayed hot most of the night and so the air-conditioning of the bus was a welcome relief. The hotel was on the west side of Paris and so is Versailles. The trip to Versailles was fairly brief.
The ground in the foreground is large cobblestones - almost impossible to walk on. Louis' quarters are the furthest building in the middle. Tickets are sold at the building to the right of center (second furthest). There are a whole variety of tickets being sold depending on how much you want to see. We settled for the "State Apartments of the King and Queen" and the "Hall of Mirrors."
For our price of admission we were given a tape recorder (solid state - no tape) with a head set. Nancy has mentioned in the past that holding these recorders up to her ear is a great way to tour places, but it makes her arm very tired. This recorder had a pair of earphones and I thought this would be better for her, but it wasn't - the spacing on the earphones was too large for her and the earphones just fell off. So, she had to do the whole tour holding them to her ears.
One of the options, instead of the recorders, was hire a docent. With all the confusion at the ticket desk we just couldn't figure out how to do that - and it was a good thing we didn't.
We had put Paris early on our "To Do" list because we wanted to be as early in the year as possible to avoid the heavy tour crowds and to avoid August because France goes on vacation in August. By Versailles standards this must have been a very light day - it was jammed. As we tried to move through the beautifully decorated, opulent palace rooms it was wall-to-wall people. There were a fair number of people like ourselves with the headsets, there were the docent-lead groups all trying to crowd as close to their docent as possible so as to hear what was happening and then there was the guided tour groups with a whole bus load of people trying to stick together. Unreal, hot and very claustrophobic!
Connecting the Kings' quarters with the Queens' was the "Hall of Mirrors." This room, along with all the standard decorations, had one wall of windows overlooking the huge gardens (as far as the eye could see) and the opposite wall was all mirrors. It was very light and open. The treaty ending the First World War was signed in this room
At the appointed time we returned to the bus, returned to the hotel and had a quiet time before an early evening meal in Paris. We elected to go ahead with the prearranged meal that the tour company had set up. It was almost identical to the meal the night before but was worth doing again. The restaurant has way much more of what Nancy expected for a French restaurant - looked like a wine cave. We walked down at least one flight of steps and were in this rounded stone ceiling room. The tables were very attractively set up with wine and beer awaiting us. Nancy thought the food was much more typical French than Saturday night. Nacny pick frog legs for her started while Jerry settled for a very nice French onion soup (dehydration was a real concern)
After dinner we returned to the hotel and retired early - the World?'s Cup Fotball (soccer) matches had started and the drivers wanted an early start the next day (Monday) so as to beat the commuter traffic and make our appointed time for the Chunnel crossing.
We left Paris at 7:00 AM Monday morning and did indeed beat the worst of the commuter traffic. The ride home was uneventful (thankfully) and by the time we reached Bristol it was cool, about 6:00PM. B&P were due to pass though on their way home the next day, so we had to get set up for that.
Before we reached Calais on the return trip, we stopped at a wholesale wine warehouse-type place. Everybody bought a case, or more, of very inexpensive wines and spirits. We bought some California wine and famous Belgium chocolates.
Despite all the trouble and pain, we would not have missed Paris for anything. We are going to let our little trip set for a while and decide if we want to go back and do some more exploring on our own. There are so many things to do that it is hard to decide.