Today is the date of the Great Train Fiasco and I will discuss it briefly and then we will never speak of it again. 😉
The flight was miserable. The plane itself was great – “most legroom in coach in cross-Atlantic flights” is something that JetBlue actually advertises, and was completely true, so much so that I’d definitely fly them again. The services overall were great – there’s no hot meal but that didn’t really matter, as the meal we did get was probably better than the hot stuff you’d get on Delta or wherever. Plenty of options on the entertainment system – I watched the first of the new generation of Ghostbusters movies. No, what really made the flight miserable was Mexico-City-levels of turbulence that made H’s flight a little white-knuckled and even left my stomach rolling. Needless to say we were both pretty happy to be back on terra firma.
The plan had been to grab the RER in from the airport into Les Halles and then walk the two or three blocks to the apartment. In theory, it should have been an easy transport — we had done the same thing in ’21 when we came for H’s 50th birthday. After we had grabbed the suitcases, though, I had seen an update that there was work on the trains, and that there was going to be an interruption in service that would require transfer by bus between some stations, and H suggested we should just grab an Uber into town and be done with it, and through some miscommunication and stubbornness probably borne out of exhaustion from not sleeping on the flight … we did not do that.
We should have done that.
What instead transpired was a haul across CDG looking for the train station, only to find out that the train wasn’t even running out to CDG, that instead you needed to keep walking to find a bus AT the airport, but first you needed to get a ticket for the train you weren’t even getting on; the bus would take you to a train station out in the ‘burbs where now everyone local AND everyone from the airport was trying to cram into this tiny train station not meant for this level of occupancy, that you were now going to have to stand the train ride into Les Halles, and then walk out to the apartment …
Yeah we’re just going to get an Uber back out to the airport next week.
We got into the apartment without much issue, pulled the luggage up the flight of stairs, then went back out to find lunch since that breakfast pastry on the flight was a long time ago at this point. We went and got oeuf mayonnaise and steaks and wine at our favorite local bistro from ’21, Le Compas on Rue Montorgueil, It’s not going to show up in anyone’s recommendation list but it became our “local” last time and a big part of why we’re staying in Montorgueil this time is because of the location, so I’m happy to have it be our “local” this time as well.
We left full and maybe a little boozy and decided to finish the day off with a coffee and a sweet treat from Partisan, a coffee roaster nearby that was open comparatively late. We wandered through some passages that Google Maps doesn’t take into consideration when giving you directions — I kinda love the narrow specialty stores that survive in these 19th-century Parisian strip malls. Partisan, however, decided to be insanely packed with humanity when we arrived — we did grab coffee and a couple of cookies and sat outside, but eventually the weather caught up to us (it’s unusually cold in Paris this week) so we called it a night and made our way back to the apartment.
(After a short stop for some supplies — namely Diet Coke and roasted-chicken potato chips.)