The Paris Saga: Day I

I don’t even remember how early we woke up on Saturday morning to leave, but it must have been around 4:30 or 5ish in the morning. We could have slept in, though, because the pilots and stewardesses all came bustling into the gate over an hour after we were supposed to leave. Good thing we had a two hour layover in Atlanta, otherwise we might have missed our connection. Anyway, the pilot was kind enough to make an announcement over the intercom to catch us all up to speed about why they were so late. It went a little something like this:

“Uhhh, folks, if you could settle into your seats as soon as possible, it would be greatly appreciated…sorry we’re late taking off this morning…our uhh, flight from Atlanta last night took a little longer than we’d expected, so it wasn’t until about midnight last night that we finally got to our hotel uhh….so, we’re running on the minimum required amount of sleep, but uhh, if you all get settled in to your seats, we’ll try to get you there just as fast as we can”.

Excuse me? You can keep that information to yourself, thanks. Anyway, we made it to Atlanta with enough time to make our connection. Our plane to Paris was newer, and had these touch screens in the backs of each of the seats, so that you could pick what movie you wanted to watch (out of about 30 choices), or what music to listen to (you could create playlists of songs…Arcade Fire was even on the menu!), or recent TV shows, and worst of all, games you could play. So while I was trying to fall asleep while watching Juno, my seat was continually being stabbed by Mr Muscly Fingers sitting behind me. I’m positive that he was playing Bejeweled. Jon had the same problem. And it went on for HOURS. I did manage to get a few hours of sleep, though, and I woke up in time to see us flying over the coast of France. The sun was just rising, and the cloudtops were all pink and pretty.

It was another hour or so before we landed in Paris, and it was a really misty morning (exaggerated by the fact that I forgot to put my glasses on before we landed). Anyway, we got our bags and took a bus to our hotel. It’s actually a really nice place, supposedly a four star, but the service was kind of crappy. I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, we dropped off our bags at the concierge, because it was too early to check in, and we walked up the street to the Arc de Triomphe (only about ten minutes or so).




We found this cute little boulangerie/patisserie on the way there, which ended up being our favorite place to eat.




You wouldn’t believe how good this place smelled. Anyway, here are a couple of close ups of the Arc.




So on one side of the Arc is the street we just walked up…


(You can see the Grande Arch in the distance)
And on the other side is the Champs-Elysees. We walked over to where it begins, but were too tired to think about shopping at all, so we headed back to the hotel. They told us that our room was ready this time, so we brought our bags upstairs only to discover…our room wasn’t ready. Not even close. No one had been in to clean it – the covers were all thrown off the bed. (Though, I guess, not as bad as the time Jon climbed into a hotel bed in Miami on one of his work trips, and discovered copius amounts of USED Kleenex wadded up in between the sheets.) Anyway, so Jon goes inside to call the service desk…and the buttons on our phone didn’t work. What! So I sat down in the hallway with our bags while he went downstairs to let them know. We waited around a few minutes for the maid to come, and she forced us to wait in the room while she cleaned it, instead of in the hallway. I’m sure she was just being nice..but it was awkward…we kept having to move out of her way as she bustled around. Once she finished, we set our alarm for two hours so we could take a nap (Jon didn’t get any sleep whatsoever on the flight, which put him at 26 solid hours of being awake by this point), but we accidentally slept for three hours, which meant that I didn’t let us shower before we went on a tour of the neighborhood. Keep in mind that it has now been at least an entire day without a shower. That’s why I’m so greezy in all the pictures from this day. And it was sooooo cold!! We ate at this cute little panini place that was about a 6 foot by 6 foot square of sidewalk, marked by plastic, tent-like walls. We split a panini, I got hot chocolate, and Jon got an Orangina. Then we split a banana-nutella crepe, which I was, obviously, very excited about.


We spent a little while at the mall that was directly facing our hotel, reading cute children’s books in French, and just milling around, but mostly everything was closed up since it was Sunday.

Three notable things happened on our way back across the street to our hotel.

FIRST: It snowed. I TOLD you it was freezing!
SECOND: We saw a man having a seizure. I’ve drawn a little diagram to illustrate how it inconvenienced us.



(Maybe a little hard to read, but you get the idea. We walked a few steps into the crosswalk, stopped abruptly, then headed to the other side of the street. Someone was already helping him, anyway.)

And THIRD: About eight cop vans, all full of policemen, pulled up to our hotel, and there were policemen at every entrance. All with assault weapons. In fact, we saw heavily armed policemen ALL OVER the city for the next couple of days, and couldn’t for the life of us figure out what was going on…until…..later we found out (VERY first-hand) that it had to do with the Olympic torch. More on that on a different day.

But that was the end of day one. Actually..it was more like two days. But you get the idea. We took a much needed shower, and slept like logs.


TO BE CONTINUED…

Beach Stories, Episode 1

I don’t foresee there ever being a Beach Stories episode two or three, but I went for it anyway.

Pretty much every family vacation we ever took was to some sort of beach, whether it was Lake Tahoe, Newport Beach, or almost any beach (you name it) between Northern Viginia and Florida. (Virginia Beach, check. Myrtle Beach, check. Cocoa Beach, check. Even Nassau and Waikiki, check).

I was kind of shocked to learn that Jon has hardly ever been to any beaches in his life. I forced him to go and find me seashells the last time he was in Florida, and that was his second ever trip to a sandy ocean-beach. He even sent me a picture of him standing in the water. There was also an option on his phone to include the sound of waves crashing. It almost sounded believable, too, until they tried to throw in a couple of electronic seagull sounds. He did bring me back some shells, though, so mission accomplished.



Anyway, our family firmly believed in vacations, and those vacations were always to some form of beach. With three girls, someone (me) was bound to get left out, so when we lived in Virginia, my parents let me take along my friend, Christine, on these trips to the coast. That way I had someone to play with and I wouldn’t spend as much time screaming at my sisters.

Okay. So we’re in North Carolina, and I’ve just barely polished off yet another bowl of Team Cheerios (does ANYONE remember Team Cheerios? They were amazing. Three or four different kinds of Cheerios in one box. I ate so many boxes of that stuff that particular trip that my mouth was bleeding, not even kidding), when The General announces it’s “TIME TO GO TO THE BEACH, everyone get your derbis, we’re out the door”.

Let me interject here. “Derbis” may very well be my dad’s favorite word in the whole world. It came from some foreign Army captain he had early on in his military career. This guy kept yelling at everyone that they’d better get their derbis together, they were full of derbis, derbis derbis, derbis. When my dad finally gets around to asking this guy “What, exactly, is derbis?” he gets the following response: Foreign Army Buddy beckons him closer, crouches down, picks up a handful of dirt, and says (with finality) “Derbis.” The General has used it daily ever since.

Okay, so we’ve just been instructed to get our derbis together and head out the door. As everyone files out, I notice dear, sweet Christine (bless her heart) hanging back, waiting for me, with a look of panic on her face. She looks left and right, pulls me aside, and confesses “but I don’t have any derbis…I must have forgotten to bring it…” I didn’t mean to laugh at her..but I did. Actually, we all did, once I told everyone what she’d said. It was the greatest thing ever.

So we’ve all got our derbis (those of us that remembered to bring it, of course) and we’re off to the beach. The waves were unusually high and we were having fun digging holes and splashing around. Corinne and Annie were floating behind where the waves break (typically I’m too scared to go out that far) and Christine and I were body-boarding. We started to notice all these little fish jumping out of the water. It was cute and kind of weird, and we all commented on it.

I’m pretty sure that not even half of my family believes what happened next, but I promise you, this really did happen. Out of nowhere, this big old wave comes up behind us. Christine was further out, facing the shore and I was a few yards in, facing this enormous wave. All of a sudden, a huge, dark, fishy shadow flashed just under the surface. The last thing I remember seeing before I turned, screaming and running out of the water and up the shore, was dear, sweet little Christine getting knocked over and churned to pieces underneath the water. She had seen the expression on my face and was in the process of asking “What is it?” when the wave got her.

(forever burned into my memory)

No one got eaten by a shark that trip, although we did visit an aquarium a couple of days later and learned a story of a shark attack that had taken place on that same exact beach years and years before. A guy was surfing and he had just paused to watch the silly little fish that were jumping out of the water when the shark bit his hand off. The idea is that the fish start jumping when sharks are feeding. Creepy! (Although, it has been mentioned to me that dolphins also eat fish, so I’m not ruling out the possibility that it was a dolphin in that wave and not a man-eater.)

Great times on the Atlantic coast. Christine became more of a member of the family than I was on those trips, as is evidenced by THIS family portrait at the top of a lighthouse.



I became all rubber-legged about a third of the way up, and once I’d gone a few more steps, I called it quits and slid back down the stairs on my stomach.

(The stomach thing may or may not be true, but that was the first time I realized that I’m terrified of heights. The lighthouse wasn’t even that high, to tell you the truth, and I couldn’t handle it. We’ll see how the Eiffel Tower goes…)

The Most. Ridiculous. Cake. Ever!

My dad turned 45 when we were living in Gardnerville, Nevada. My mom would always take special orders for cakes and meals for birthdays, so my dad requested a chocolate cake with EXTRA frosting. He and my sister are nuts about frosting. Annie refused to leave for college before learning how to make homemade icing, and now she routinely makes up an entire batch JUST to sit and eat it plain, with a spoon, over the course of a couple of days. And my dad is almost as crazy. So my mom makes up the two cakes and loads a thick layer of icing in between before coating the outsides with it, too. Then she leaves it to set for a while and when she came back, she discovered that the entire top cake had slid about two inches to the side, thanks to the copious amounts of icing. And by that time, the frosting had set, so there was nothing she could do about it.

Well, my sister Annie and I thought it would be cool, since it was his 45th, to make a “45” on the cake out of 45 candles. So we counted them out and placed them meticulously into this lopsided cake, and we thought we were so clever and such good artists, and we were so proud of ourselves.

So here’s this cake sitting on the table just waiting for my dad to come home from work. Everything is in place for his special-order dinner and we’re watching TV when my mom starts screaming. By the time my sisters and I made it to the kitchen, there was our (literally) retarded cat, Boo, in the process of cleaning her whiskers after being chased away from a delicious meal of chocolate cake.

So by now this poor cake was completely ridiculous, but it was way too late to make a new one, so my mom scraped off the section that had been eaten and smeared more frosting over the hole (ew).

This time we’re smarter, so we cover the whole thing with a large overturned glass bowl until The General returns from work. When it’s finally the moment to bring out the glorious cake, I head into the kitchen to reveal our work of art. Well, in the process of removing the glass bowl from the ridiculous cake, I lost my grip and dropped the thing hard, so the edge of the bowl made a HUGE half-circle dent across the surface of the cake (the part unaffected by the retarded cat, mind you).

I can't quite remember my dad's reaction when he finally saw the stupid thing, but I'm sure he wasn't as amused as us...not mad or anything.. he was probably a little disappointed. I would have been. This cake was pathetic. Regardless, my mom and sisters and I are all totally cracking up as we relate to my dad the stories of why his poor cake ended up being so ugly when my mom starts lighting the candles. 45 candles, to be exact. All in close proximity to each other. Each of the individual flames melded into one BIG flame, and the candles started melting so rapidly that he barely had the chance to even make a wish before we brought out the fire hose. Okay, not really, that was definitely an exaggeration. But it was a pretty good bonfire we had going on.

And THAT is the story of the most ridiculous birthday cake in the world. I dare you to come up with a story about a more accident-prone dessert.

Shews

I bought new shoes today. I'm in serious need of some comfy work shoes, and when I was searching for them in Dillards, I came across these instead.



Not quite what I was looking for, but pinstriped (!) and only 50 bucks. I've sworn off of shoe shopping in Aldo, by the way. A mixture between how insanely crowded the stores are, and THIS girl that works at the Aldo in our mall.



Really, she's ridiculous. I drew this little sketch the other day when I was trying to describe her to my sister. Sometimes words just don't do it justice, you know? Yes, those are suspenders she's wearing. And she has been wearing those suspenders EACH AND EVERY time of the three times I've encountered her. Wow.