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Published: June 16th 2017
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Geo: 48.8566, 2.35097
In France, I have been eating fresh croissants every morning for breakfast. I am going to miss those greatly. Forgot to mention that at our hotel they served a buffet type breakfast and they always had warm croissants, scrambled eggs and I guess what they thought were sausages, but they looked exactly like American boiled hotdogs. I couldn't bring myself to try them for breakfast. Stuck with my croissants.
I have eaten so much bread and cheese here, but it is so good, I can't stop myself.
Driving was always a challenge. The tiny roads are fine, until someone is coming toward you. I grit my teeth and slow down and everyone thinks I am nuts. We must have driven through 100 roundabouts. Luckily, all but maybe 3 of them were signle lane roundabouts. Those are easy. I have mastered them. The roads signs aren't easy to decipher. Roads change names a lot. If not for the GPSes and maps, we would have spent half of our days totally lost.
It is hard to get used to everything shutting down during lunch, and we never got used to dinner at 7:30. We ended up eating a big late lunch and usually snacking on bread, cheese and pastries for dinner.
French people still smoke a ton. No one was mean to us, but they tend to block sidewalks and walkways when they are talking to someone and it is hard to get them to move. They just move at a different pace.
It was a somewhat stressful travel day today. We dropped our rental car in Avignon (yay). We took the train from Avignon to Paris, but the station was confusing. There were multiple trains coming through the same platform all bound for Paris. Finally, we found an American family that knew what was going on and we stuck with them. They are actually on our flight through Charlotte tomorrow.
The train was nice, but it was oversold. Every seat was taken and apparently they sell standing room only tickets. It was packed. There were people everywhere, giant luggage in the aisles, and dogs. Crazy. It was also running late so we weren't sure when our stop was. All of the announcements were in French, and a brief one in English that still sounded like French. No signs in the train announcing the next stop. We panicked a little, but it all worked out. We got out at the Airport stop and checked into our Airport hotel with the screaming wifi. Finally!
Fly out early tomorrow morning.
We have had a wonderful trip. Dot always does a great job with our itinerary. We had a good mix of big city London and countryside France. We have been very lucky in the weather. Yesterday was a little chilly and windy, but other than that, it was pretty awesome. We managed the language barrier. In many areas, there is very little English, but we got by. Croissant and chocolate seem to be universal words.
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Linda
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Good job courageous driver and expert navigator. Now fly home safely and I'll share with you a STL bakery or two who have close to REAL French croissants Hope to see you soon.