Paris--and London--revisted

This is the problem with writing a blog a week after the fact.  You forget some things--and maybe for good reason.

There were two things I wanted to add to our story in Paris.  The first is that on Wednesday night we were discussing my trip to Paris by way of the Eurostar train that goes from central London to Central Paris and we got this crazy idea.  Why not take the train the next morning to London, just for the day?  Of course I was for it.  I love London, as people who read this blog will know.  So I got online to see whether we could get tickets.  I put in the next day for going and the same day for coming back--or at least I thought I did.  (There were defaults for the dates that had to be overridden).  We had to do the search a number of times but finally got tickets that I bought with my Amex card and were already to be on the train by 9:13 the next morning.  We were insanely excited about doing something so cool and spontaneous.

When I got up in the morning, I was thinking how easy it was to get tickets--and how cheap they were considering the late date and something entered my mind.  Had I changed the default date for coming home the last--and successful time--I ordered them?  I looked online and to my horror, we were set to come home five days later.

We went to the train station and to the ticket office and tried to change them.  But as luck would have it, Britain was starting a bank holiday weekend and the trains coming from London to Paris that night were almost full which meant that the tickets that were left were very expensive--about $600 more than we had originally paid.  That was out of the question.  We tried to get tickets for Friday or Saturday, but they were just as high-priced.  We thought about going to London and taking our chances throwing ourselves on the mercy of people whose language we actually spoke.

But in the end we went home and I called the London office of Eurostar and convinced them to refund our money--which they do not normally do.

It was quite a rollercoaster of emotions.  Elation at the idea of going, disappointment at not being about to, fear that we would have to pay for the tickets anyway, and relief that we got the refund.  So by the time we left the apartment for the Champs Elysees we were already exhausted.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that when we were at the gardens at Versailles, the Chateau was playing wonderful music that really put you into the mood of the 16th and 17th Century.  I taped it and I wanted to share.

Yesterday I took a trip to the seaside in Normandy.....I'll write about that soon.