What An Adventure!

I arrived in London on Wednesday to a cloudy, chilly day.  After a restless night, Thursday dawned bright and sunny.  I headed into the office at Staines (35 min train ride from Waterloo station) to find that some sort of volcano in Iceland was erupting and my colleague's flight from Dublin was cancelled and he would be late to our meeting.

I didn't think too much of it and continued on with my day.  A couple of hours later, I started paying a little more attention to the volcano ash cloud.  We were scheduled to fly from Gatwick to Bordeaux on Saturday morning to spend a girls' week in a castle-side cottage in Beynac, one of the most beautiful villages in France, located in the Dordogne Valley.  My other colleagues began urging me to book some Eurostar tickets as a backup.  I finally did, just to appease them, but I bought the fully refundable fare and really didn't believe that I'd need them.

Fast forward a few days.  Europe is in chaos.  Millions of passengers are stranded, including 3 out of the 5 girls of our group.  My Sat morning flight was indeed canceled and Eurostar tickets are all sold out.  Meanwhile the French railway union have decided to strike and the TGV trains from Paris to Bordeaux were unavailable for purchase.  So we got on a packed Eurostar train, got what seemed to be the last Hertz car in Paris (after waiting in line for 45 mins) and started driving 650 km south to Beynac.

Let's just start by saying that getting from the Gare du Nord to the southern periphery road to the A10 highway is no mean feat.  Especially for someone who hadn't driven in downtown Paris for at least 10 years plus had not driven a stick shift for 2 years.  About an hour and a few u-turns later, we were finally heading south on the highway.

On our way to Orleans, we made a highway rest stop where the ham and cheese parisian sandwich from the Paul bakery far outshone almost any sandwich available in Menlo Park!  Of course, our temperamental car had some issues starting up again plus has some strange choking rough patches when you're running in gear under 2500 RPMs.  We going to try and trade it in to a nearby Hertz tomorrow.

Hours and hours later, about 14 hours after we left our hotel that morning, we made it to La Maisonette, our rental house in Beynac.  It's full of character and wonderfully decorated in a charming manner.  Alas, the 300 feet walk from the parking lot to the house involved an extremely uneven giant cobblestone path sloping down at a 30 degree angle.  Suffice to say, it's lucky that I didn't break my neck or my nice high heeled boots.

And so, the two of us are banging around this house tonight, hoping against hope that some of our friends will be able to make it over the pond before the end of the week.  And also hoping that the darn volcano calms down, the ash cloud dissipates, and that we can actually fly home in a week.