Restarting the Blog

Restarting the blog:

One thing that I learned in France is that hotel owners guard their wifi bandwidth like fathers guard their daughter's innocence. After repeatedly loading pictures onto Elane's tablet, resizing them for upload, writing the text and, finally, attempting to upload them to Blogger only to have the process freeze I decided to give it up for while we were on the road. The new plan is to put together some posts as if they were "Live" and do it from the comfort of home with a glass of wine - not that there wasn't wine in France, but, I digress.

So, here we go, enjoy...

Day 1 - the trip to Beaune, France.

Maybe I should be glad that getting to Europe was such a pain in the neck/rear end because, if it were easier, I'm not sure France could stand it. On this trip we were rewarded for our conservative planning by not having to panic as unexpected hours of travel ticked by. First, our flight to Toronto popped up as delayed. The United rep said that people with short connections should consider checking into other arrangements. We had a comfortable layover in Toronto but checked into it anyway. Good thing because, while our new flight arrived in Paris over an hour later than our original, the flight to Toronto was cancelled completely.

No worries, we still had plenty of time to get from the Paris Airport to the Gare de Lyon train station and catch our TGV (high-speed train) out of Paris to Burgundy

. Most of this time was spent in line while 65 other travelers and an hour and a half of time passed to pick up our reserved tickets. (Note to self - make sure that our credit card has a chip in it for the next time we go to Europe). A short wait and a nice walk later, though, and we were zooming east at 130 mph.

Beaune is known mostly for 2 things, wine and escargot. We finally settled in to enjoy both at a fun brasserie on a wonderful evening on the Place Madeline.