Black Cats and Graveyards

We arrived in Paris feeling nauseous with jet lag. We stumbled around in, what should have been, the uplifting Parisian streets for a few hours, sucking down as many strong French Coffees as we could without throwing up. It took a solid, recovery day - and after sleeping like the dead in a quaint, downtown lodge called Austin's Hotel next to the Gare de St. Lazare, we had the first of several , delightful walking tours of the French capital.

We were not sure how full the train would be for our next travel leg to Cherbourg. So as we were almost completely, but not quite, overloaded with baggage, we booked a train ticket and a hotel for our stay in Cherbourg, as soon as we got into Paris. After booking a ticket, we soon thereafter discovered that the 'regular' railway strikes, which are scheduled & managed on the railway's web site calendar, would actually prevent us from leaving Paris. Our ticket that we had just booked, was not going to work.

We needed to arrive a day later in Cherbourg and stay an extra day in Paris - to accommodate the scheduled strike. This meant that we actually could not book our intended hotel in Cherbourg, according to their system. So we changed hotels in Cherbourg, changed the train tickets to the following day and then added an extra day's stay in Paris. This, to accommodate the calendar managed strikes. We are in France! Strikes are on Schedule. Trains are not.

Strikes are a way of life, and the systems tell you when they will happen - but the same systems will still let you book a train that is not actually going to run - on a separate web page.

In Paris, the trick is to stop worrying about life - and to just live it instead. Go with the flow. There are far more important things in life than to organize a train time-table.

Such things include: Cafe's full of interesting people watching opportunities, Whipped Foamy Hot Chocolate, Gorgeous Stone Architecture at every turn, a Million and one delicious things that you can create with an extended set of dairy products - and of course, the best bread in the world that may genuinely contain highly addictive ingredients only beknown to a secret division of French Tourist Association - who organize a strict time table of dosage each morning into their baker's dough. I just hope Parisian Bakers never go on strike!

The French baguette is made form a very simple set of ingredients: Flour, Water, Yeast and Salt. That's it. The 'but', or the 'trick', unfortunately, is that you need a very high temperature oven with 'steam' injection or a water bath to significantly raise the humidity inside the over - during cooking. This moisture creates the crackling, thin, crust that encapsulates the moist interior of their famous, slender loaf. And is presumably, why the shape of a baguette is the way it is.. to increase the moist air exposed, surface to volume ratio.

We didn't think we had ever seen such an oven in the US.

Dawn, again (?!?!?!!!!) wanted to wander around a graveyard. It's kinda odd that you can discover new and curious traits in a person after being married to them for 20 + years...

Please check out our video a sample of French Sites...

French Architecture , at it's finest....