Day 1: Arrival

Where do I start? In some ways the run-up to this trip was very similar to the run-up to my trip to Scotland earlier this year. I spent a lot of time making lists and buying supplies. Also—unlike the trip to Scotland—I spent time planning our schedule and buying tickets in advance for all the sights we wanted to see. Many of these venues now require not only a ticket but a reservation for a specific date and time. So I worked out a schedule with Marie, and then spent several hours booking us into one after another.

On the other hand, when the day of my departing flight came (October 31), I don't remember anything like the levels of anxiety that I felt before my flight to Glasgow. Maybe that's because I had just finished an international trip a few months before, while my last international trip before Scotland was in 2019. Maybe it's because Scotland was brand-new to me, while this was my fourth trip to Paris. Whatever the reason, I got myself to the airport without too much tsuris, and clambered aboard my flight. It was a nonstop to Paris, so I didn't even have to worry about changing planes.

Marie and I had scheduled our flights so that they landed within half an hour of each other, and they were allocated to the same terminal. We figured this would make it easy to meet up. But Terminal 2 at Charles de Gaulle Airport is enormous, and the gates are widely separated. What's more, my flight was allocated to the international gates since I was flying directly from the United States. Marie had to change planes in Amsterdam, so her flight was treated as somehow more like a domestic flight. We collected our bags and cleared Customs, and were still in different places. Fortunately we were in touch by cell phone, and realized this. Marie asked at an Information desk how to find me, and I made sure to stand still so that she wasn't hunting a moving target. After a little while we found each other. The next step was to buy Navigo passes so that we could hop on and off busses and subways; this meant standing in line for well over an hour, but it was an essential step. And then finally we could take the train into town, to the Quartier Latin.

From there, in a sense, the day was remarkable only for how well it went according to plan. We got off the train at our stop, found our hotel, and checked in. We walked around the neighborhood for a little while, then got some dinner and went to bed. Even so, Marie was pinching herself every so often to remind herself, "I'm really in Paris!" It was sweet.