Saturday, September 7, 2024 – Travel day from London to Paris.

Today is a travel day. My daughter Sara flew back to Houston this morning and for the rest of this trip I will be solo. It was so much fun exploring London with Sara. I am taking the 12:31 AM Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris. This is the train that travels through a tunnel under the English Channel.

Two hours and fifteen minutes after departing London I arrived at the train station in Paris. The train cars were clean and modern. The seats were comfortable and the ride was silky smooth. What a great train trip.

After I got off the train I had to find a bathroom.

This is the bathroom in the train station. They charge people one euro to use the bathroom. I think that is chickenshit. Pardon my French. The train ticket wasn’t cheap and then at the end of the line you are going to charge me a buck to use the bathroom?? Give me a break!

After I got my money’s worth out of my visit to the train station bathroom I commenced the 45 minute walk to my hotel. As you can imagine the area around the train station was a little sketchy. After 15 minutes or so the sketchiness started to fade away and it started to look more like Paris, sidewalk cafes where beautiful people were sitting at little round tables drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

This is my hotel. I am a couple of blocks from Notre Dame. I am paying about the same daily hotel rate in Paris as compared to the daily hotel rate I paid in Springfield, Illinois when I visited my mother in early August. That makes no sense at all.

My room is on the fifth floor. This is the one and only elevator for the entire hotel. It says you can fit three people in it. I had a hard time fitting my Michelin star fattened carcas into it along with a small suitcase.

This morning I got up at 6:30 AM to wash clothes in the apartment in London. I have never been good at laundry. Washing the clothes was no problem but the load was big and the clothes dryer was small so the clothes were still wet when I pulled them out of the dryer at 9:45. I had to check out of the apartment at 10:00 so I chucked the wet clothes in my suitcase and now I have wet clothes draped all over my hotel room. I hope they dry overnight.