The French Rental Car from Paris

In the pinky-blue sunrise of a crisp Santa Fe winter morning, I think back on five days in Paris and three days’ driving adventure around the west of France, soaking in images of rolling countryside, stopping in Giverny, Rouen, Honfleur, Mont Saint-Michel, Vouvry, Amboisie and returning to the insane traffic and confusion of navigating to Charles De Gaulle Airport, and how describing each rich and tasty encounter, each “aha” and delight, each ”ya gotta laugh” moment is like trying to stuff a king-sized down comforter into a quart-size bag; it’s impossible but you compress a corner and keep pushing.

I was in Spain for a week in November and I’m on my way today to ski Vail. I’ve researched, written and published articles, kept real estate deals moving forward, studied fractional ownership and website design, rearranged the house and spent time with friends. In the fast-forward mode, as the past rapidly receeds, the best I can do is make a brief recount, save the photos to disc and trust that someday the earth will spin slower and days will spread out before me with time to recollect, reflect and recount.

We left Paris on Friday morning in a rented Toyota minivan, but not without a story or two! I had made reservations online through Auto Europe/Hertz, for a 10 a.m. pick-up, and received a travel agent discount. Train stations seem to be the major pick-up/drop off points for rental cars in Paris. Not knowing how to best depart Paris for Giverny to the northwest, I randomly chose the Montparnasse station from a map because it was on the west side of the city. Not a bad choice. The taxi from our apartment on Rue du Seine dropped us at the Hertz office where a line of people snaked out the door and around half a block. Inside, there were two agents, taking an interminable amount of time with each reservation, an enormous amount of paperwork to fill out, questions to answer. This is crazy, we’ll be here all day!

My pushy New York self went into high gear and I “excuse-a-moi’ed” myself to the “gold club” reservation desk where one old gent kept up a lively conversation in French with the attendant as if there weren’t dozens of people waiting. I coughed, I made eye contact with the man behind the counter and finally, in desperation, I asked as nicely as possible, “Can you please help me?” Sure, he replied, folding the old gent’s papers into a folder and wishing him a good trip. He turned to me and began processing my reservation and within 10 minutes we were out the door, past the line of the terminally patient and looking for a car in some underground lot to which we were vaguely directed.

As there were several underground lots in that general direction, we wandered, schlepping our rolly bags behind us, frustration mounting. Finally we saw a small “Hertz” sign across the street, took an elevator down 4 floors and stumbled into the Hertz rental. Once in our minivan we followed the “sortie,” exit signs, powering out of the depths of the earth, descending, rising, going in tight circles until some 10 minutes later, exhausted from stress and carbon monoxide fumes, we emerged into the Paris streets and joined the stop-and-go traffic headed west to the Periferique (ring road) and the highway to Giverny.

Our Paris Apartment: Sleeping with the Eiffel Tower

Behind the massive royal-blue doors of #23 Rue de Seine, on the Left Bank, half a block from the Quai where the Pont des Art intersects the Louvre, hides a courtyard with an art restoration shop. Within this courtyard is a locked double-door into a 6-story building of apartments. Marie Noel (Merry Christmas) meets us with the ever-lilting two-tone doorbell-like intonation: ”Bon jour!”

Marie Noel is our greeter who works for France Homestyle, the Seattle-based property management company through which I booked this apartment. There is an elevator that goes to the fifth floor and is rated for three people, but they’d have to be three stick figures. Like most Paris elevators, it can barely fit one within its accordion doors. Instead of people, we pile in our luggage, push the 5th floor button and walk up the five flights of marble steps adorned with Oriental red carpet runners that wind in a dizzying pattern past oval windows, past the elevator and up to the sixth floor.

Our apartment welcomes us with rich honey-colored wide-planked flooring, creaky with age and character, a wall-hanging coat tree with mirror, a small hallway to the right with a half bath sweetly scented by delicate lavender soap. At the end of the hall is a compact U-shaped kitchen. “It is small but has everything,” says Marie Noel, opening cabinets to show the colorful China, wine glasses and basic provisions. The window above the sink frames the gilded dome of the Institut de France, and I gasp at the closeness of its magnificence. “Qui,” says Marie-Noel with a nod, as if seeing a monumental dome out one’s kitchen window were a normal occurrence.

Back in the entry and straight ahead is the public space. A narrow wood stairway spirals down to the guest en suite and up to the master suite, but first, the room opens into the dining area, with French doors on to a small balcony overlooking the inner courtyard. In the center of the room is an imposingly elegant square wood table with 6 straight-backed upholstered seats. Against the wall a marble topped buffet sideboard of carved oak, with statues from the Far East in ivory and porcelain. Beyond there is the living area with sofas draped in white muslin and dappled with red-striped silk pillows, side tables stacked with picture books and billowy-shaded lamps, a blood-red wood coffee table with carved legs, perhaps from Indonesia, a large leafy plant and another French-door balcony. Mirrors, paintings and art nouveau sconces adorn the walls. There is a stereo system and telephone, which Marie Noel explains how to use. There is a bookcase full of interesting reads for which we will have no time. It is elegant and chic and all ours for the next five days!

Marie Noel next guides us down the creaky spiral which enters into a unexpectedly spacious room. To one side is an inviting queen-sized bed with draped canopy, a romantic nook. To another is a large desk backed by a wall of built-in cabinets, including a TV which she apologizes does not work but can be fixed. We assure her we do not care. There is a storage room with one of those marvelously absurd European washers, which take forever to cycle, and unvented dryers that go to a thousand degrees to fry but not dry one’s clothes. And there is a bathroom, more spacious than most Paris hotel rooms, tiled in small black and white octagons, featuring a giant claw-footed tub, and a sturdy deco-era lav, plus a toilet and bidet. We ooh and ahh, grateful that this flat more than compensates for the disappointment of the one in London.

Finally, we tromp up the spiral, past the main floor to the piece d’ resistance: the roof-top 3-sided glass room I’d seen in the website photos. The Eiffel Tower is straight ahead to the north, Sacre Couer gleams white on the eastern hillside, the towers of Notre Dame rise to the south, as do the spires of St. Germaine and St. Supice to the west. For the next 5 nights, on the king-size futon that fills this room, I will fall asleep to the gaudy light show on the Tour Eiffel and wake to the view of it over the Mansard rooftops of Paris.

This glass perch is so above-it-all that even sitting on the toilet one has a clear view of the Eiffel Tower. Who’d have thunk it?

But that’s not all. The glass room opens to a terrace and it is here, on folding cafe chairs around a large wrought-iron and glass table, that the four of us will share meals and laughs and stories and, most of all, create memories to cherish for the rest of our lives.

“It is OK then? You will be happy here?” asks Marie-Noel. Yes, we will be very happy here.

The Chunnel: No Claustrophobia Here!

If you have never ridden the EuroStar train between London’s Waterloo Station and Paris’ Gare d’ Nord, you may, like many people, imagine it to be 2-3/4 hours in an ominously dark tunnel far beneath the cold rough seas of the English Channel; "claustrophobic" and downright unnerving.

But you’d be wrong. In fact, this sleek, comfortable high-speed train whizzes you through pastoral landscapes, ever so typically British on the one side, with red-brick row-house villages, and so tres French on the other, with white-plastered farm-houses dotting rolling fields. For a brief 20 minutes you are in the actual Channel Tunnel (Chunnel), and may not even realize it as the train car is brightly lit, the windows darkly-coated and the atmosphere often festive.

Before boarding, we buy gourmet snacks from the impressive, pricey and popular Mark’s & Spencer food store at Waterloo Station — ready-made salads, chicken wraps, sesame-coated nuts, chocolates and wine — and are ready for our lunchtime feast to enjoy while traveling through one of the greatest engineering feats of all time. Imagine, this $15 billion dollar tunnel, completed with unlikely cooperation between the British and French governments (who, you recall from history class, have been battling each other since…well, since before there were Celts and Gauls) is the first post-Ice Age link between Britain and the Continent.

First, we show tickets (purchased online before leaving the states for 98USD each), are given a boarding pass with seat number, snake through a 10-minute line to security with typical airport-style X-ray machines and finally pass the French immigration booth where our Passports are stamped. Welcome to France. And we hadn’t left London yet! The main waiting room is boring – an insufficient number of attached orange and blue molded plastic seats, a sterile coffee bar and a couple of kiosks offering you your last chance to buy a Paddington Bear or cardboard face mask of Prince Charles, or otherwise throw away your last precious Pounds Sterling before arriving in the land of the Euro.

However, if you possess a first class ticket (for about four times the price), there are sumptuous lounges with broad leather chairs, big screen TVs, drapery-laden walls and hostesses to serve you drinks from the bar. We try to ingratiate ourselves but no way — hoi polloi must await the cattle call in the main area. An hour later the train is ready for boarding, the coach class hoards troop through glass doors, up flights of stairs and on to their assigned cars. The tight-rowed seats, two to a side, are comfortable and high-backed with pull-down trays, but the few facing one another are taken so we are unable to converse with our companions and, once underway, pass provisions back and forth over our heads.

In the front of our car is a party of kilt-wearing Scotsmen en route to the Rugby Championships being held in Paris. Their boisterous brogue is indecipherable but they are clearing having a good time and are not yet drunk enough to be totally obnoxious(as we later see some of their countrymen at the Eiffel Tower). Time passes quickly with charming countryside to observe, good food and drink, a bit of reading and map study, some shut-eye, and soon we’re in the industrial outskirts of Paris.

As the train pulls into Gare d’ Nord, one of the Scotsmen sweetly plays the entire Marseilles on a high-pitched but pleasantly melodic recorder. People stand in their tight rows and smile. When he is done, we all clap and many shout, “Viva la France!” just like in the movie Casablanca. It’s great to be back in Paris, and a marvelously convenient way to arrive!

London in Summation

OK, so our London adventure was not seamless. One could say it was disastrous, but I would not. Humor forbids it. But the trip did improve in every respect, and that’s what I remembered after it was over, when I began this blog sequence.

Yet London was full of laughs and delights — the live-like plague-rat puppet purchased from The Globe gift store, which Jan used to torment her younger brother into fits of laughter; The absurd justification by the owner of our expensive Kensington flat as to why he did not provide soap, shampoo, tea or sugar; The British Museum’s Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles (pillaged from Greece and still controversial); Discovering architect John Soan’s surprising house/museum; The view from the Tate Modern’s restaurant, where we walked in without a reservation, just before it opened at 6pm, and were seated at the window; Westminster Abbey after it was closed to the public; and, most especially, the company of friends:

Di and Andre are an artistic English couple living in Wales who, in 1992, took a shower at our mountain home west of Denver (since the distant relative they were visiting had no running water) and drove the three hours from their hilltop farm to spend the evening with us in London. “It was the least we could do,” they said.

Jonathan, a man I met via the internet only a few months before while attempting to rent a flat in Paris — of which he has a gorgeous one in the Marais but it was not available for our dates — drove from the northeast side of London to meet us for a drink at a Kensington pub on our last evening.

Ben, a friend-of-a-friend who came through Santa Fe three years ago and stayed at our home, guided us with brilliant narrative through Soho, Trafalgar Square, St. James and Green Parks on a Friday night, after pints and great Indian food. Then, he spent Sunday afternoon with us wandering Southwalk amid street performers, big bronze statues and riding “The Eye,” a bird’s eye view of the sprawl of London.

To have better appreciated the history and architecture, we would have needed more time, more guidance and a more-comfortable bed. Four days, including two in the daze of jet lag, is not enough. For people traveling to London (or any major city you do not know) for just a few days, I recommend a tour — it’s more cost effective and less stressful than my do-it-yourself approach.