the notty travellers

Paris - October 9 (Geoff) Hi everyone, this is our final blog entry for the adventure that we have just experienced. I am writing this on the laptop whilst sitting at the kitchen bench at home (Oh its so nice to be home!). But now I need to update you on our last day in Paris and the trip home. We had to check out of our hotel so organised ourselves (packed the bags yet again, moving stuff around till it all fitted and hopefully the bags came in under our weight allowance on the planes). Then, after leaving the bags at the hotel for the day (our flight from Paris to London was at 7:15 p.m. and then we had to transfer to a Qantas flight to bring us home via Bangkok) we went for ... read more

Paris 7 October (Sue) What can I say about today.... eventually life catches up with us all. We had planned to jump out of bed, catch the metro and then a regional train to Versaille to see the palace and grounds. Instead we woke feeling extremely tired and decided to have a lay day. After all we have seen the odd palace or 2 in the last 7 weeks. We found a shopping centre and cruised the shops. Geoff was very indulgent letting me have a shopping fix while he walked and waited. I only have one negative comment, not enough comfy chairs for the poor husbands. Having recouped a bit of energy we made our way to Notre Dame cathedral. This is a very gothic and austere building in all senses of the word. It ... read more

Paris - October 5 (Geoff) We had breakfast in the hotel and then got organised to get our Paris passes. This meant getting ourselves organised on the metro to get to the Hard Rock cafe in the 9th Arrondissement. If I do say so myself, we managed this quite well and got there well before the 1:00 o'clock cutoff. Then off to the Gare St Lazare to organise TGV tickets for Amiens on Wednesday. We still have to organise tickets to get us to Versailles but we can do that tomorrow. We decide to walk into the city centre from here and, even though there is once again a cold wind blowing, it lets us see people and buildings that we otherwise would miss. We have a quick lunch and then walk into the Place de ... read more

Amboise - October 3 (Geoff) Today was C day. C is for Chateaux. When we arrived in Amboise, Sue contacted a little tour company by the name of Acco-Dispo who specialise in touring the area by minibus to arrange a tour of the outstanding Chateaux in the region. We enjoyed a leisurely start to the day and sauntered down to the Tourist Information office to meet our guide, one Pascal Accolay at 10:30. He was a youngish guy who spoke pretty good English, thankfully. We really appreciated not having to wait long as the air temperature here is pretty cold and there is a freezing wind blowing - I reckon the wind chill factor is about -5 degrees. Our first port of call was a Chateau about 10kms out of Amboise, called Chennoneaux. This was a ... read more

Amboise, Loire Valley 1 October The trip to Paris on the night train was uneventful, but a disturbed night of sleep. The night trains are fast which means they rock from side to side and are noisy. Not the best conditions for sleep. We woke around 7.30am expecting to arrive at Paris by 9am. Somewhere in the night we had lost 2hrs and were informed we would arrive at 11am. Our next train from Paris to Amboise was at 11.40am. When we looked at our ticket we noticed it left from a different train station. As it was an open ticket we figured if we missed it we would just have to catch the next one. We made a quick dash from the Bercy station to the Austerlitz station across the Seine (didn't have time to ... read more