It’s not even 7:00AM, and I’m wide awake, sitting at the computer in my office. I have stacks of finals to finish grading from the winter semester (the grades are due by tomorrow afternoon). I have stacks of syllabi for my spring semester classes which will get underway in about two hours. And I’m cruisin’ on about three hours sleep over the last two nights combined. Jet-lagged again.
My wife and I went to Paris for Valentine’s Day. For years, I’ve had the audacity to call myself a world traveler (and a historian of Europe), but had never once set foot in Paris. (Except for a transfer through Orly when I was six, which most definitely doesn’t count.) I’ve flown over France plenty of times, and been to most of the nations that surround it. But for any number of reasons, had never been. And what better time to go than for Valentine’s Day?
It was a hectic trip getting there. We had redeemed miles with Delta to get ourselves to Europe; since it was a free flight, we had to show some flexibility in our travel plans. We left LAX early last Tuesday, flew to Atlanta, and then on to London Gatwick. We then had a car take us to the Ashford International Railway station in Kent to catch the Eurostar into Paris.
I’d bought non-refundable tickets for the Eurostar. The flight was due into Gatwick just before 7:00AM, and the train wasn’t until 11:00AM, so I figured we had plenty of time. Despite some lingering thundershowers, the flight from Atlanta took off promptly, and I figured we were set. Three hours into the flight, somewhere over the Atlantic, the pilot jars me and 200 hundred other folks out of a doze, telling us we’re diverting back to Boston to remove “some illegal cargo that had mistakenly been put on board.” (No one told us what the cargo was, though a flight attendant mentioned birds, of all things.) It’s always a bit nerve-wracking to be diverted, because a little voice always tells me that there’s actually something wrong with the plane, and the captain is just pretending it has something to do with cargo in order to keep us all calm.
Sitting on the tarmac at Boston Logan, I figured we’d missed the 11:00 Eurostar for sure. We frantically called American Express (I always book through their travel service), trying to reschedule, but by the time we got to a live person, we were forced to hang up the phone for takeoff. We landed in Gatwick just after nine, over two hours late.
Amazingly, our driver got us from Gatwick to Ashford in under an hour, in traffic, in pouring rain. We made the train with time to spare. (If you live in London or the southeast of England, you ought to be impressed.) In fact, the taxi service was so danged good I’m going to endorse them here.
Our brief stay in Paris was delightful. We were walking distance to everything, with a fine Eiffel tower view from our bedroom. We were able to walk everywhere (no taxis, no Metro, just feet), and I am eager to go back for a much longer stay. Even at my frantic pace, there was simply too much to see in two days.
Our Valentine’s night dinner was vegetarian, of course; our travel agent found us what claims to be the only Michelin 3-star primarily vegetarian restaurant in the world. (The website is all in French. I can read French pretty well, but can’t speak it to save my life. Arpege does serve some meat products — alas including foie gras — but it’s very easy to have a vegetarian, even vegan meal that meets the standards of haute gastronomie.) The meal lasted nearly four hours, and I was blissful throughout the entire time; my wife was awed that her hyperactive, fidgety husband was able to sit still and be cheerful and present for so long! We did the tasting menu, composed almost entirely of root vegetables prepared in the most unexpected and extraordinary ways. It was the longest, most delightful, and most romantic dinner of my entire life. Worth every Eurocent, even with a very weak dollar.
Last Friday, we flew directly from Paris to Exeter to visit my brother and his family. It was cloudy and wet most of our stay in Devon, but we had a happy time regardless. Lots of long walks along the Exe estuary, lots of good potato and veggie pasties.
I’ll try and post a few pictures in the Flickr account later today or tomorrow.
Oh, and as of this morning, I’m once again going off all diet sodas and artificial sweeteners. I’d been doing so well for so long, and then had a relapse last fall that ended up lasting about five months. As of this morning, no more diet Cokes. My students will not see any more giant mugs of cola; they will see lots of water and a regularly refilled coffee mug.
More on other things soon.
Wow, you two ate at Arpege, Alain Passard’s restaurant - I’m jealous! The closest I ever got to a celebrity chef was shaking Alice Water’s (of Chez Panisse, Berkeley) hand (not dead-fish style) during a Cal Banquet in SF about seven years ago.
We didn’t meet Passard. But we sure met most of the rest of his team; I can’t recall ever eating in another restaurant where every table was full and there was still a 1:1 ratio of patrons to staff.
The view in the photos looks awesome. Which hotel was it? And I can only imagine how much you spent!! How do you afford all this traveling on a professors’s salary, if you don’t mind me asking?
We stayed at the Hotel de Crillon. And as far as the money goes, I suppose I do mind you asking — OKOP don’t discuss raw numbers
Sounds like a good trip. Could you perhaps sometime talk about how you balance your enjoyment of the good things in life such as travel when most of the world’s population does not have such opportunities available to them? How do we balance liberal guilt with a life of privileged affluence?
Now that is a post I’m willing to do, John; I’ll queue it up.