Home at Last

Well it took over a year for me to learn how to blog on this site. Has everyone recovered? I have hit the ground running at work and at home. IT is hot and I want to be back riding the bike on the canal. Hank and Teri, I know I said it a lot, but thank you. It was THE trip of a life time.

Don't we look great and well rested? I miss you all. Stay in touch.

Kathy

Flight schedule and last post

Just a reminder that our flight leaves on Wednesday. This Wednesday. Be there or be square.

All but the Gideons will depart from Birmingham at 11:40 a.m. on Continental Flight 2603.

We'll arrive in Houston at 1:30 p.m. and the entire group will fly from Houston to Paris on Continental Flight 10 at 3:05 p.m. Word of warning--depending on which Terminal we arrive and depart from--you may have to go through security a second time in Houston which is a huge, huge pain. Be ready for that.

Please allow plenty of time to make the flight. The Continental website suggests getting to the Birmingham airport two hours early when flying out during our time slot, so govern yourself accordingly. When you get to the airport, go ahead and check in. You all have e-tickets in your own names, so there's no need to wait for the herd to gather. The flight to Houston is on a fairly small plane, so we'll have no trouble finding each other at the gate.

Steve and Mel, you'll need to be there a couple of hours early because you're going straight to an international flight.

Jen, Colleen, Teri and I (and probably Mike) will be coming in together anyway. Jen and the kids arrived on Saturday and Teri made it home safely from Washington on Sunday.

Colleen has surfaced from her woodsy isolation, and we can't wait until she gets here. Drive safely!

If you're interested, our flight from Houston to Paris is 9 hours, 40 minutes and our flight from Paris to Houston is 11 hours, 5 minutes

I beg of you, please don't leave your passports at home! If you forget everything else, you can still go and buy or borrow what you need along the way, but without a passport you're grounded.

I suspect this will be the very last Marjorie post. If you're interested, I'll be kicking off a new "Best Year Ever" diary blog when we get back, and I'll pass on that URL once it's created.

It's been a real joy contributing to this blog. I hope you've enjoyed it and found it helpful at times. It has been my sincere prayer all along that this upcoming adventure creates wonderful memories for us to share for the rest of our lives.

See you in France.

Love,

Hank

Teri brings home hardware

Most of you know that Teri is in Washington DC until Sunday. She's there with her Ad Team from the University of Alabama who were competing in the national finals of the annual advertising competition. This is a huge deal in Teri's discipline, as over 150 colleges and universities compete every year with the top 18 or so teams advancing from district competitions to the national finals.

This year Teri became the advisor (or "coach") of the Bama team after having done this at both Auburn University at Montgomery and Loyola University.

The good news is that the Bama team came in 2nd place in the nation (Syracuse won). This is the culmination of a tremendous amount of work on the parts of the students and Teri, and is a terrific accomplishment. This is something like her 20th year taking a team to the competion. If memory serves, over that period she's been to the national finals seven times, meaning she's won the district competition that many times.

The picture here shows the group in their finery after competing in the district competion in Baton Rouge earlier this spring. Click on it (or any picture on this blog) to get a closer look. They're a terrific bunch of kids.

Of her seven trips to the finals, her teams have placed third, second (twice now) and won it all one year. Teri would know for sure, but I seriously doubt that any other ad team coach has a record anything like that.

The team flew from BHM on early Thursday morning. Six college students stayed at our house on Wednesday, so Teri left me with a lot of housework, especially since I had to turn the house around for the Marjorie guests arriving starting today. My mother and Jen and the kids will get here today. My mom will be house kid/house/pet-sitting for us while we're away.

I couldn't be more proud of my dear wife. Congratulations Teri! You're the best! I can't wait to tell you that in person tomorrow.

How great is this?

A message from our guide in Paris

Looks like we'll have a 12th person at our table for dinner on Friday, which should be very cool indeed.

Bonjour William,

Thank you very much for your kind message, I've found your picture, thanks ! You seems to be good friends and who loves France (I love USA !). I went twice in USA : in west USA in 1998 and in NYC in 1999. My favorite city in the world is New York and San Francisco

No problem for me to make a shorter walking your restaurant is not far away from Montparnasse, it is in St Germain area a little street in front of the St Germain church, so very easy to go before 8pm

Thank you so much to invite me !! Are you sure ? I don't want to be an intruder.. it is so nice, I think I can come with you to the restaurant.


I'm an administrative assistant in a humanitarian organization headoffice, I like my job, I like Paris. I was born in Paris and I grew up there. I'm not very good in history but I know Paris.


Last year, a friend from Portland visit me and I show him Paris during one week and after that, he called me Amelie Poulain (it is a famous french movie) I like to meet some people from all over the world, it is so great.

I'm volunteer guide from only one month, you will be my 2nd walking tour, but I am a guide for my friends from France and my nephews

I send you a picture of me here enclosed to help you to recognize me.

I'm working at the east of Paris and I will do my best to arrive between 5:45pm and 6:00pm

see you soon (A bientot)
friendly
armelle

PS : if you have the email address of George Clooney or Barack Obama, I can be available for them for a walking tour in Paris !!!!

Walking tour update

This is mostly for the subset of us on the walking tour (Beau, Kathy, Steve, Mel, Teri and me). I'm copying the rest of you mostly to make you jealous.

I've heard from our volunteer guide. Her name is Armelle Mercier. Her e-mail to me was very charming and she offered to give us all kinds of advice. She claims to speak only broken English (and said she'd be bringing along her French/English dictionary), but I'm positive that her English is better than my French, and between the two of us there won't be any problems.

She will be taking us on a walking tour of Montparnasse, Odeon and perhaps St. Michel.

The time slot we have is 6-8 p.m. on Friday, which bumps us right up to our group dinner at Le Petit Zinc. Armelle is a volunteer and has a regular job so she's not available before 6. She offered to meet us at the hotel. I asked her if we could be sure to end the tour in time for us to make our dinner date and will let you know how that goes, but you may be going on your walking tour in your dinner clothes.

Also, I invited her to join us for dinner after the tour if she is available (my treat), so the rest of you may meet her as well. I'll let the Maitre D know if that's happening, but I'm sure it won't be a problem for the restaurant.

A quick phone call

If you haven't already done so, now is the time to notify your credit card company that you'll be traveling to France. This will reduce the chance that your card will be declined while on the trip. It doesn't guarantee a hassle free life though.

We had our credit card declined only once on one of our trips. It happened in Turkey when buying a rug, even though I had made the call to notify the credit card companythat we'd be going there. I'll never forget that the rug cost over a BILLION Turkish Lira, but at an exchange rate of something like 1,200,000 Lira to one US Dollar at the time, we're not talking crazy wild spending here. I remember a Turkish guy telling me "we're all millionaires here." The rug merchant called the credit card collect number on the back of the card and I spoke with the guy on the other end for a few minutes and the charge went through.

Anyway, I digress. Just call the 800 number on the back of your card, and, after wading through the menu options you'll eventually get to "travel notification". I just did this with my two cards and one used a completely automated system where you entered your dates into the phone and the other actually took me to a human being. It only took a few minutes.

Typically they want at least 48 hours notice to process the notification, so do this now while you're not doing anything better with your time than reading this on the blog or your e-mail.

Links

I just added a link to the 10 day forecast for Paris to the links section of the blog on the right hand side of the screen. It's the top one.

If you've never looked at the links on the blog or haven't in a while, I suggest you spend a little time with them now, giving special attention to a few I'd like to mention.

If you're bringing an mp3 player (iPod) with you, I strongly suggest you go to the Rick Steves link and print his maps and mp3 downloads of his walking tour of Paris, and his guides to the Louvre, Orsay and Versailles. The Louvre is massive, and it would take our entire time in Paris to cover the whole thing. Even if you did spend your entire time in Paris in the Louvre, everything would be a blur without a little context or an art history degree. Rick does a terrific job of taking you to the "right" places and giving you some insight without boring you. Also, his hand drawn maps are very, very good.

I just downloaded all of those mp3 files (except the Louvre, which I'm skipping this time) and loaded them on the pod, so I guess I'm taking it after all. I'll encourage Teri to do the same thing with her pod, so we can walk around the museums like total geeks staring at paintings and having Rick tell us what we're looking at.

If you haven't already, please, please, please print out the 5 page pdf guide to our trip done by Special Places Travel and read every single word of it. It covers just about everything in terms of the practical information you need from whether to bring a computer (no) to special sightseeing tips in Paris. If you read this guide several months ago, read it again now. I just remembered that this guide was also included in the "kits" you all received so you probably have it lying around the house somewhere. It's the one that has the signed "welcome aboard" cover sheet.

If you're planning to buy a museum pass, or even if you're not, I would encourage you to go to that link and download their pdf brochure. The brochure gives the operating hours and Metro stops for all the major museums in Paris. I think they're supposed to give you this brochure if you buy the pass, but there's never a guarantee that they'll have it. Print pages 7 thru 18 (and add page 25 if you're planning to go to Versailles).

This and that

Cathleen and Kathy mentioned separately that, with our trip a week out, they were having a hard time focusing at work. I guess we'll all be a little distracted for the next few days.

***

Kathy also has a weather report. She wants everyone to know that she saw a clip of a memorial service held at Notre Dame this afternoon and that people were in shirt sleeves so it was a warm day in Paris.

***

I love a good quote, and today I discovered some great quotes that combine the two things I'm focused on at this moment--all things French and writing.

Jules Renard was a French writer whose best work was written in the early 1900s. Here are a few quotes from him about the occupation of writing:

"Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none."

"Writing is the only way to talk without being interrupted."

And my favorite . . .

"Writing is the only profession where no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money."

***

Exactly one week from when I'm writing this, we should be over the Atlantic Ocean. Woo Hoo!

Pack your rain gear in your carry on!

The forecast has changed a bit for our arrival.

Paris Forecast for Thursday June 11

Packing List--#6 in a series

In an age of digital photography and digital e-mail, this is really old school, but be sure to pack the addresses of folks back home so you can send post cards.

Even though you'll probably get home before they arrive, people still love to receive postcards from beautiful faraway places. At least I do.

Postcards are a happy snapshot of a trip in progress and they let people know you're thinking about them--even if you're not thinking about them much--while you're off having the time of your life.

But to send postcards, you need addresses. Rather than pack your entire address book and risk losing it along the way, I would suggest deciding in advance who the folks are that you want to send cards to while you're on the trip and then writing or typing their names on sheets of paper that you keep with your photocopies of your passports and credit cards (see packing list item #3).

One cool thing about postcards is that there's not enough room on them to say more than "having a wonderful time, wish you were here", allowing you to be thoughtful without expending much actual thought or effort or taking more than a few minutes away from the fun you're having.

Teri and I always buy postcards on our trips--not just to send, but to keep too. Our theory is that if something happens to the camera, we'll still have beautiful pictures of the places we vistited. Think about it--postcards represent the best effort of a profressional photographer to capture a sight in its ideal light and perspective and at its most pristine.

Twice I've lost pictures on trips. I lost some pictures taken in Greece when a roll of film got soaked by shampoo. Lather, rinse, repeat doesn't work so well on film. Those pictures were of the changing of the guard and other Athens scenes.

On our trip to Vietnam, I came home with hundreds of pictures, but I lost the best fifty or so from the entire trip when I had them burned to a defective CD and then erased the chip to make room for even more pictures. We lost all the pictures of our overnight stay in a home in a tribal mountain village and a close encounter Teri had with a water buffalo in hiking to that village among other things.

I have the memories, but I still mourn those "lost" pictures and it's been over a decade since that trip to Greece.

Ooo la la - 75 degrees on Wednesday

Well we won't arrive in Paris until Thursday, but the Wednesday forecast is available and it is a fine one. 75 degrees and sunny with a low of 53 degrees. Hopefully Thursday will be more of the same!