Pining for the Fjords

In the penultimate post about our February trip to France, we spent the day wandering the Louvre and the streets of Paris, enjoyed high tea at Le Dali , and ate an amazing meal at Laserre ! Back in the sprawl of the Valley of the Sun The alarm went off early on Thursday morning (of course, I was already awake, having spent another not very restful night at the Hotel Saint Louis Marais - that bed was way too hard for my old hips), and we got to work showering, packing up the remainder of our luggage, and straightening up the room before we headed out.  Around 6:15am, we took the elevator downstairs to the lobby to check out and settle our bill, as well as await our car to Charles de Gaulle airport.  When we reserved a room at the hotel, they offered to also book us a shuttle for the early morning trip to CDG, and we happily accepted.  The charge for it was more than taking the RER line back, but it was far easier, and we were fine paying the difference to avoid navigati...

In Part 10 of the "trip to France" blogs, we lucked out and caught one of the only trains from Bordeaux back to Paris during a major transit strike, and we wandered our old stomping grounds, the Marais neighborhood. Posing with the Olympic Rings at the Hotel de Ville, Paris' city hall. The Summer Olympics will be here in 2024 Neither of us slept amazingly well from Tuesday to Wednesday at the Hotel Saint Louis Marais ; it was in a quiet area of town, but the quiet didn't extend to inside our room, as the faucet within the shower dripped all night (we closed the door and turned up the white noise machine, but still).  The mattress was also harder than we're used to, and after almost a week away, we were missing our bed something fierce.  Eventually, we started our day in earnest, taking showers and getting dressed, rolling out the door around 9am. I also had a pre-breakfast snack of roasted chicken Lay's, which I fell in love with when we visited in 2018. Thi...