Parisian Paradise - Part I: The Journey

After receiving "exclusive rights" from Deidra to blog about our Paris trip, I took a look back at the recap from my previous international trip. I've decided a serial blog about Paris is in order as well.

We started our journey on Wednesday night (1/6). After a full day of work and a full night of church meetings, I picked up Deidra and we headed to Farmington, where we stayed the night with Daron, Lisa and Austin. They were excellent hosts. Lisa gave us a ride to and from the airport, and they took care of Nelly while we were gone.

From Salt Lake, we flew into JFK airport in New York. Deidra's cousin and her husband (Whit & Brian) were also joining us for this Paris excursion, but they had different flights than we did. We tried to meet up with them while we were both laying over in New York, but that caused more of a hassle than it was worth. We arrived in terminal 2 at JFK, we received word from Whit and Brian that they were awaiting their flight to Paris in terminal 1. Figuring that we would most likely be in the same terminal for our flight out, we exited terminal 2 and proceeded to terminal 1. However, upon close examination of our tickets, we realized that our departure was back in terminal 2. We went to the ticket counter and unsuccessfully tried changing flights from ours (through Dublin to Paris) to Whit & Brian's (straight to Paris). We then called our trip companions to let them know that we couldn't meet them in their terminal and would see them in Paris.

Then we turned back to terminal two and realized that we had made a definite mistake in exiting the terminal. That meant that we had to go back through the crazy security mob, which consisted of an enormous line (loosely termed) proceeding to two metal detector machines . . . one of which was broken. Luckily, we were in no hurry, as our flight was hours away. But it was still frustrating to proceed at a snail's pace for over an hour.

As we approached the metal detector, Deidra turned to me with nervous astonishment.

"Our water bottles aren't empty!"

We quickly pulled our water bottles from our respective bags and proceed to chug down their content before reaching security. This was somewhat easy for Deidra, with a half-filled half-liter container. It was significantly more difficult for me, with a full one-liter container. But I am happy to report that I was able to drink that full liter of water in about a minute's time, and we successfully made it through security. (I did, however, have to use the restroom three times before our flight.)

Our red-eye flight to Dublin was fairly uneventful. The movies were boring and I was less successful than Deidra in actually getting some sleep.

We quickly made it through customs in Dublin (our first passport stamp of the trip!). Our layover in Dublin found us waiting in a cold terminal for a few hours, which was only made better because of the UK family waiting near us, consisting of a mother an three sons (ages 14, 13 and 9, probably). It probably won't be as entertaining to you, but just imagine us being low on sleep and the boys talking in their Irish accents and it makes it funnier, I promise.

The boys starting betting on the toss of a 5-cent coin. At first, they tried "heads and tails," but it was quickly determined that "there are no heads and tails - only the 5 side and the not-5 side." So then they started betting pennies on the "5 side" or the "other side."

The youngest of the three soon lost his loose change, but was undeterred. He and one of the older brothers opened up their respective packs of Starbursts and began betting pieces of candy, which they referred to as "lollies."At one point, the youngest brother lost a toss and the older brother demanded two "lollies" instead of one. This started a brotherly argument that I, the second of four boys, could certainly appreciate.

Finally, toward the end of the betting, the youngest brother had lost about half of his "lollies." The mom finally recognized what was going on, and admonished the older brother to "give your brother back his lollies. Those are for the flight!" At which, the youngest brother pleaded: "But mum . . . I lost them fair and square!"

Like I said, probably not funny to anyone but Deidra and I, but it certainly helped pass the time.

We finally landed in Paris at about 3pm Friday afternoon (1/8), where we purchased train tickets and commenced to navigate the train and Paris streets to Le Royal Hotel. We were expected to meet Whit and Brian at the hotel at 5pm, and we rolled in there right on time.

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(P.S. Sorry for the length of this first post and the lack of pictures. I promise more pictures and shorter posts going forward.)