Paris arrival and journey to Niort

For reasons that will be one obvious, this post is best read with Haydn’s Symphony No. 101 in D major The Clock playing.  I hope this link makes that easy for you to do:

Haydn’s Symphony 101 - the clock. Finale

You know how it is when you have to go to the airport early… you kiss sleep goodbye.  I expect that and I’m not complaining, especially when the time difference means I have Bronwyn and Jill for company on our fascinating Wordle exchange and 👍🏽🤪😱 etc. 

The fast train to the airport goes every 10 minutes and has you there in less than 20 minutes.  I claimed back the tax for the few items I had bought, checked in, boarded and flew to Paris.  We landed 25 minutes ahead of schedule.  Kath and Elaine were coming in from Rome and we were to meet at cafe Eiffel.  We did, but it wasn’t easy getting there for any of us. I think I notched up 10,000 steps just going from my bag carousel. Maybe I exaggerate… 9,800 perhaps. Elaine and Kath joined me eventually and then we headed to the taxi rank.  That was another trial.  We were all agreed that we were only catching an official taxi yet one man would not take no for an answer and became increasingly hostile, and then mocking.  Crikey.  But he didn’t wack us, so that was a relief. 

     We were driven to Gare Montparnasse by the best taxi driver we could ever have wished for.  The price was fixed, the traffic was heavy. Once he realised our train wasn’t leaving anytime soon, our driver decided to take us the scenic way. With Haydn’s magnificent, grand music playing, our eyes filled with magnificent, grand architecture. He drove us past the Champs Élysées, we looked to the right and saw the Arc de Triumph, over there the Eiffel Tower, Rodin’s backyard, the President’s palace, the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais… and as we crossed “the most beautiful bridge in Paris”, the gilded Pont Alexandre III, Les Invalides rose majestically before us and Haydn hit a crescendo!

We loved our taxi driver.  

Our train trip to Niort was fast. We wrangled our too many bags and found ourselves on a station platform with too many stairs.  None of us were up to them with any ease.  And then along came the saviour Rubin, pronounced Robin. Well that was another love story.  Not only did he run down with our heavier bags, but he then toiled for a long time to find us a taxi. You see, we didn’t know that we needed to book one ahead of time. We didn’t know that taxi drivers would be reluctant to bother with such a short journey.  We considered the 21 minute walk with the bags, but Rubin persisted in between his work with the trains, consulting his worn paper schedule, checking his watch, dashing on long legs to speak to a taxi he saw at the lights way over there.  No luck. Back on his phone seeking another taxi, then racing to the platform to greet a train, then back to us. He said my pink hair was a good thing because the eventual driver would find us easily.  Finally another driver accepted the task and we bade Rubin a fond goodbye.  We had grown close to Rubin in that hour or so together. We learnt that he had studied English in Canada where he met his Mexican love and we wish them both all the luck in having the the babies they are hoping to have.  We reckon he’d be a great father!  

During all of that, Kath had been on the phone to the proprietors of the house we were renting and who were cooking our evening meal.  We arrived about an hour later than they had been expecting. And we found ourselves in a big house decorated in a way we were not expecting… more on that next time.