Saint-Aignan and Paris: the trip begins

So we left Saint-Aignan Wednesday at 8:40 a.m. on the train. An English friend who lives in our village came and picked us up and drove us the four miles over to the train station in Noyers-sur-Cher, across the river.

Walt waiting on the platform at the Saint-Aignan train station

Sign announcing the station

We took the local train, called a TER or Train Express Régional, over to Tours, arriving at about 9:20 a.m.

From Saint-Aignan, you can go to Tours or to Vierzon by train

We went to a café-restaurant near the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse, or high-speed train) station called Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, on the outskirts of the city of Tours, because we had an hour to kill and figured we would go ahead and have a very early lunch. We ordered two croque-monsieur, which are grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, and they were served with green salad. I had a glass of wine (I'm bad) and Walt had a glass of tomato juice.

The TGV coming from Toulouse and continuing on to CDG airport

At 10:25, we boarded our TGV for the ride up to Charles de Gaulle (CDG) airport. We didn't need to go into Paris and change trains and train stations, since there are trains from Tours directly to CDG. The train runs at high speed through the countryside up to the south suburbs of Paris, and then runs at lower speeds around the city on the east side up to the airport. It makes a stop at Marne-la-Vallée, which is where EuroDisney is, and we could see the Space Mountain ride and the Disney castle out the windows of the train. (One more château!)

The Etap'Hôtel on the airport property, next door to the Hyatt

So all that went really smoothly. It was just past noon and we were at the airport. We found out way to the point where airport and hotel shuttle buses pick up passengers and waited for the shuttle that would take us to our hotel. And we waited. Shuttles for all the different airport terminals and for dozens of hotel came and went. We decided to give it 30 minutes before we looked for another solution. Maybe we were in the wrong place.

Just as we were getting ready to give up and go searching elsewhere, our shuttle drove up. We were planning to spend the night at the Etap'Hôtel, a budget accommodation. We would get only about five hours' sleep anyway, so why pay more? We were hoping it would be clean and comfortable even it it lacked any frills whatsoever.

The room at the Etap'Hôtel, Roissy Nord 2.
Shower door on right, opening right into the room.

When the shuttle finally came, it wasn't at all a long ride to the hotel, and the shuttle wasn't all that crowded. We got to the hotel, checked in without incident, and went to see the room. It was very clean, and the bed was firm and comfortable. There was a TV but no telephone. There was a nice shower in the room, but there was no bathroom as such. The sink was in the room. There was a separate water closet for the toilet, so that was private. But having the shower and sink right in the room meant there wasn't any privacy. FYI.

Planes were taking off right over our hotel, and the room had a window of course but with two double-glazed panels in it. You could open it if you wanted to. We didn't need to, because the room wasn't too hot or too cold. And we couldn't hear the planes taking off at all. Not at all.

After we dropped off our bags at the hotel, we took the shuttle back toward the airport terminals and got out at the RER (Réseau Express Régional, or regional transit network) station to take the local train into the center of Paris. The weather was outstanding.

Notre Dame de Paris, 05 octobre 2006

We had dinner reservations at Allard, an old French bistro on the edge of the Latin Quarter. And we wanted to do some walking around Paris, to get the exercise and to take advantage of the nice day. We got off the train at Châtelet, which is pretty much the center of Paris. We walked over the bridges across the Seine and into the Latin Quarter near Notre Dame cathedral. There were many people out, and the line to get into the Sainte-Chapelle, for example, stretched quite a distance down the sidewalk from the entrance.

Restaurant Allard on the rue Saint-André-des-Arts

After a stop at the Gibert Jeune book store on the boulevard St-Michel to pick up a book I wanted for the trip, we walked over to the Allard restaurant to look at the menu. That way we could spend the afternoon anticipating our dinner. It was about 3:00 p.m.

I was kind of hungry since "lunch" had been so early in the day, but it was too late to eat another lunch. We walked through the little touristy streets in the Latin Quarter and I looked for something to eat. I finally found a place that sold a little basket of french fries for two euros. I got those and ate them as we walked around. In that neighborhood, you can do that. And I could do it, I thought, because I'm on vacation!

The Bastille with the new opera house in the background

We stopped in a café across from Notre Dame and had a glass of wine — a Touraine Sauvignon from near Saint-Aignan. Then we decided to walk across the Ile Saint-Louis and over to the Bastille. That's a 30-minute walk, I guess. We sat down at another café and had another glass of wine there, a Petit Chablis from Burgundy. We watched the people walk by and the cars speed around the traffic circle that has the Bastille column as its center.

La place des Vosges on a sunny October afternoon

On the way back to the Latin Quarter, we walked through the place des Vosges and the Marais neighborhood. We stopped in a chocolate shop and bought some dark chocolate candies to take to our friends in Albany as a present. I also stopped in a Nicolas wine store on the Ile Saint-Louis and bought them a bottle of Quincy wine. Quincy is a wine area about 30 miles east of Saint-Aignan where Sauvignon Blanc grapes are grown and vinified.

The chocolate shop on rue Vieille-du-Temple in the Marais

On the way to the restaurant for dinner, we had about 45 minutes left to kill. We walked up to the rue des Ecoles and decided to sit down and have one more little glass of white wine before dinner. We sat outside, and the waiter proposed a Bordeaux blanc that was very good. We were just across the street from the Hôtel des Carmes, where friends of ours have stayed several times.

Dinner at Allard was good. The only thing we didn't like was that we were seated in the American ghetto of the restaurant. We figured it was because we asked for a table in the non-smoking section.

On one side of us was a couple from Boston who were spending the week in Paris. We chatted with them for a while. On the other side was a middle-aged man with a 20-something woman. He seemed to be a teacher or professor and she a former student of his who is living in Paris. They talked about classes she was taking, about other former students of his, and about U.S. universities like Wellesley and Columbia.

In a corner of the room were two older American couples who were all dressed up and quite talkative. They spoke English to the wait staff without even trying to speak any French. They just assumed English would be fine. One woman asked about what she had determined was a veal dish on the menu -- what was it exactly, she wanted to know. Oh, that's the kidneys, the waiter said. She thanked him with a little look of disgust on her face. She and her friends ordered the house wine by the glass instead of ordering a bottle.

Walt and I had a bottle of Pinot Noir from Sancerre, which is 60 or 70 miles from us on the Loire river. It was quite good. Walt had snails and the veal kidneys for dinner. I had a green bean salad with smoked duck breast as my starter, and a breast of guinea fowl (pintade in French, or as some San Francisco friends called it, "pterodactyl") served with lentils as my main course. We both had dessert -- W. had a charlotte au chocolat, and I had vanilla ice cream.

After dinner we took the RER train back out to the hotel. We slept for about 5 hours before having to get up at 4:00, catch the shuttle at 5:15, and arrive at the terminal to check in for our flight by about 6:00 a.m. Our plane was scheduled to take off at 8:30 and arrive at JFK airport in New York at 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.