Misadventures In and Outside of Paris...or...How NOT To Spend Your First Day In France

Based on my last post, I'm sure you're all thinking that after the family and I landed in Paris, we were flown on the wings of angels and placed loving in our new home in Le Cap d'Agde.  I WISH I could tell you that something even remotely close to that happened...but it didn't.  I figured this would be the best place to rehash what was probably one of the worst 24 hours of my life instead of having to retell the horrific story over and over and over again.  So, here it goes...

Our plane landed in Paris around 8:30am Paris time, which makes it 2:30am to our internal clock.  Thankfully, the little one slept very well on the plane and had a good 6 hours under her belt.  We went through border security with no problems, though I'm not sure why the little one's passport was stamped and neither the hubs or mine was...hope that's not a problem later...but these security guys aren't one to answer American questions.  Baggage claim was as expected with the exception that baggage carts are free in France.  What a concept, right?  We gathered all our belongings, strategically placed them on the cart the only way they would all fit, and headed off to find the train station.

What I had been told about the train station was that it was at the airport.  What I had not been told about the train station was that it was a 10 minute walk from our terminal.  Yeah, the airport is THAT big.  To make matters worse at first, the arrival gate was flooded with people.  The hubs is trying to manage our overflowing luggage while dodging people also carrying overflowing luggage, which was difficult to say the least.  When we finally made our way to the train station, it took a while and one very nice French lady to point us in the direction of the right kiosk in which to print our tickets.  That successfully done, we could do nothing for the next hour and a half or so but sit and wait.  See, in France, they don't post what platform your train will be leaving from until 15 minutes before the train was to leave.  We would find out soon how big of a problem this would be.

Once posted, we did our best to navigate ourselves...and our luggage that we no hated...through the crowd of people to the platform.  When the train arrived, there seemed no rhyme or reason to which door you got on.  We went to one with a relatively short line but were refused entrance to the train as one of the workers pointed us further down the tracks.  We made our best attempt to get there, but the train left us, screaming for it to stop, standing on the platform, totally frustrated.  We did manage to exchange our tickets for a later train, but given that we would be in the same predicament as before, we decided we would rent a car and drive down to Le Cap d'Agde ourselves.

Here's where I'm going to skip over some of the details.  In short, it took us an additional 2 hours to locate and secure a rental car.  There were lots of bumps along that 2 hour road, but as we finally set off in our rental car, I was glad for that moment to be out of that airport...and still married.  There was only one problem with the car...no GPS.  The company didn't have GPS.  So we would be forced to return to our childhood roots and buy a map to get us to our destination.  Thankfully, we come from a generation that still knows how to read maps.  Had I been 10 years younger, I'm not sure I could have done it.

Two gas stations and two maps later, we finally had a plan on how to get where we needed to go.  Here's where we incurred another road block...so to speak.  The car also had no navigational direction on the dashboard.  You know, that little N or S or E or W that tells you what direction your headed?  Yep, none of that...so...in short...it took us about another 2 hours just to get 30 miles or so outside of Paris.

The rest of the day and night consisted of constantly taking wrong turns on the confusing small French roads and having to drive miles out of the way just to turn around.  The French love to put blockades between the lanes of the roads and separate their exits by a good 10 miles, so if you make a wrong turn, you basically have to drive in the wrong direction for 15 or so minutes before you can turn around to the way you need to be going...paying tolls along the way, of course.

After almost 8 hours in the car (the total amount of time it should have taken us to get all the way to the school), we pulled off into the town of Clermont to get a hotel for the night.  We were guessing at that point we would have 3-4 more hours of drive time in the morning...if we went the right way the entire time.  The hotel we chose was small, incredibly hot and all around miserable.  Since the little one had spent most of the day sleeping in the car...which we didn't complain about...she spent most of the night awake...which was rough!  The upside...we had a room, wifi for the night so we could tell our family we weren't dead and I could contact the school who was expecting us at the train station, and a hot breakfast in the morning.  Things had to get better, right?

And thankfully, as the sun came up the next morning, things did get better.  We were able to plot our course with the help of Google maps to find that it was a strait shot on the highway to get to our new home.  We found the school with only a few wrong turns in our way and the staff was really friendly.  The hubs got our baggage settled into our new apartment while I got registered and fitted for uniforms.  Our new home is small, but plenty of room for the three of us.  I found out that my only task the next day was a French placement test in the morning and then I had the rest of the day free until meeting the staff at a cocktail party that night.  This gave us a nice chance to take the car to what the staff at the school called, the big grocery store, and load up on some supplies.  The big grocery store was in fact a cross between a Target, Costco, Best Buy and Department store.  It was MASSIVE.  Thankfully, by the end of Monday, we were fairly settled in and I was ready to get started.

So now the journey officially begins...