StanleyWheeler

It was still Thursday. We left the Arc de Triomphe to begin our walk down the Champs-Elysees .  No trip to Paris is complete without a stroll down the Champs-Elysees . It was a bit of a walk. My wife didn't want to go into the fancy stores along the way. It was getting late, so we just wanted to enjoy the walk to the Louvre. Google tells me that the distance is 4.5 kilometers. That's just short of 3 miles in real measurement. It wasn't a bad walk...it was a very nice walk...but there were complications. Now that we had left the monument with the free restroom, my companion informed me that she needed to use the bathroom--complication number 1. We were also getting thirsty. I bought another Orangina--the precursor to complication number 2.  We made an attempt at addressing complication number 1 in the long park that runs along a portion of the thoroughfare. A sign indicted that use of the facility would be 2 euros. The place looked a little off-putting...so ...

The Thursday continued.  We left Sacre Coeur, walking down the near infinity steps, down the street, past the little shop where we had purchased the bag, and back to the metro. The red book sheet for the day showed us at step 15 (of 22) getting on the M12 at Anvers. Step 16 had us ride to CDG Etoile; 17 was visiting the Arc de Triomphe.  And I have no idea who the person in the white jacket with the upraised arms might be; just some other tourist; but it really makes the picture come alive.  From the outside, the monument seems huge. It seems even taller when one is going up the stairs inside. Before we got to those stairs, we had to take a tunnel under the roundabout and come up in the center where the Arc stands. There was nothing unusual about going through the metal detector... except that I kept setting it off. The people behind us were losing patience. Finally, the guard just passed us through without any groping or stripping...in spite of the rather rude sug...

It was Thursday. We had deviated from the planned 22 steps by skipping the Catacombs earlier, and later going to the Eiffel Tower. Getting back on track with the plan put us at step 13 on our page from the day in the red book which was to take the M12 to Abbesses...except we weren't near the M12 because we had not walked from the Musee d'Orsay to the M6 Assemble National. Instead, and I don't remember the first part of the route, but eventually we took the M2 and got off at Anvers.  My original plan called for us to take the funicular up the slope of Montmartre to Sacre Coeur. It didn't happen that way. From our metro stop, we began walking up the street. The plastic bag that we had received when we had purchased the souvenir shirts (don't ask me what kind of shirts souvenirs wear) had a tendency to make one's arm sweat. We decided to buy a cloth bag in which to carry the shirts. We stopped at a busy shop that sold lots of stuff...lots of stuff that held ...

It was still Thursday. We had just left the souvenir shop near the Pantheon. We were on our way to the Luxembourg Gardens. The sidewalk was pretty wide, wide enough for some shops to have racks of goods out on it. There was also a youth sprawled on the sidewalk. He had two suitcases next to him. The suitcases were red. We gave him a wide berth; there was something hinky about the guy.  I realized what the feeling was when my wife kicked the container, made from the bottom quarter of a clear plastic water bottle, which held a few coins, and which he had placed out in the center of the walk. The container was virtually invisible. She hit it solidly, like an opening kickoff. The bit of bottle went tumbling; the coins went skittering. Did I mention the grate across the sidewalk? Most of the coins went down the grate that was located about six or eight feet from the ambush site.  I found two of his missing coins that the grate had not consumed, both one centime pieces. I could...

It was a Thursday.  According to the red book, we had 22 steps for the day's events. I had constructed the red book before we had left home. Every day had been planned with destinations, addresses, telephone numbers, flight numbers, airports, arrival times, etc, from the departure day of May 11 to the return day of May 19--all tucked into clear plastic page protectors. Each day had a schedule page, subsequent pages contained the documents that we might need for that day. The red book had served us well. At hotels, I had pulled out the reservations previously made online; at the car rental when the girl insisted on asking me every question that I had already answered online, I showed her the page from the red book and everything went smoothly. My advice regarding the red book, in the voice of Karl Malden: Don't leave home without it.  But this was Thursday.  We were going to Paris. We would be at Notre Dame by step 3. Step one consisted of breakfast...and we skipped th...

I never anticipated going through customs in Germany. As you may recall, our itinerary as scheduled was supposed to go from San Francisco direct to Paris. However, that famous German  Helmuth von Moltke the Elder  said something like, "No plan survives contact with the enemy." He might've added, "Or with Untied Airlines." (I have spelled it that way intentionally: so the carrier will remain technically anonymous...and to make sure I don't get dragged from a flight in the future. Actually, except for the delay(s), all of the carrier personnel were very nice, helpful, and never once threatened us with removal or bodily harm--if you don't count the in-flight meals (of course, I jest--about the in-flight meals, that is.)). So I was surprised to discover that we were going through customs in Frankfurt. We hadn't reached out destination; I saw no point in going through customs until we had reached the nation of our destination (desti nation ?). Thinking ...

We landed at  SFO  on "a warm San Franciscan night." Except that it was afternoon, and we were on a plane. We were tired, but we had good company; Jim and Nancy had become our traveling companions. We made our way together through the airport like a band of great white hunters on safari. In other words, we had no idea how to get where we were going, but we followed the sign of our quarry--large printed signs that often seemed contradictory or poorly placed--to reach our destination. Our destination was the international terminal, the  Hotel California  of airport terminals; once you enter you can check it out all you like, but you can never leave. Once we found the international terminal and passed through the security, we knew that we had entered  A Whole New World . Sweet perfume wafted to our nostrils, beckoning us onward into the labyrinth. Stores for perfume and jewelry--Hermes, Cartier, and Swarovski --these and more promised awe and wonder in the inter...

If you're not early, you're late... That's why we arrived at the airport at 10:00 a.m. The flight was scheduled to depart at noon. Things began most auspiciously when we got to go through the TSA pre-check security line, instead of the general strip-and-cough-for-the-x-ray-machine line. It was quick and almost painless. When we located our departure gate, I recognized the petite woman at the counter from my previous flight with this airline some nine months earlier. That flight had been delayed; I had spent a great deal of time in lines and on the telephone trying to re-book alternate flights for the missed connection in Chicago. That time, my flight had not actually been delayed; the flight to San Francisco had been delayed, and the airline then cancelled my flight and used my plane to fly those people to SF. Ironically, when I was done with re-booking, my new flight plan took me via SF...several hours later. On this flight, we were already scheduled go via SF. ...