Sunday (9/5) it was rise and shine before dawn. The alarm went off at 4:30am with the taxi pickup shortly thereafter at 5:15am. My first leg was a quick 2 1/2 hour jump to
Cincinnati. Thankfully, Delta upgraded me to first class for this short trip (I’ll take any upgrade since I used points on this trip). The plane was on time and I landed in
Cincinnati early around 10am. Now the first of 2 long waits. My flight to
Paris wasn’t until 3:50pm. In the end I paid $50 for a day pass to Delta’s Sky Lounge in Cinci and killed time there by sleeping, reading and I also walked around the terminal. The flight to
Paris was also on time. As I first sat down in the plane, I was sitting next to a rather bulky guy. Thankfully, as the airplane door closed I was able to commandeer an aisle seat in the first (bulkhead) row of economy with no one sitting next to me. I killed the 8+ hours flight by watching
The Karate Kid,
Quantum of Solace and sleeping (no personal TV, just old school overhead TVs). Thanks to the high tailwinds, I landed in
Paris (CDG airport) about an hour earlier than scheduled at 5:15am. Being so early, I was through the empty immigration and baggage claim by 6am and on the shuttle to the other
Paris airport (
Orly). The shuttle took about an hour to get to
Orly and I was there at 7:15am. Great, another almost 5 hours to kill until Jenn arrived. So I took up a bench in baggage claim and watch
From Paris With Love. I received a lot of stares as I didn’t move my legs off the bench when arriving passengers wanted to sit down as they waited for their luggage from various arriving flights. Hey, I was tired. After the movie, mom called to let me know dad was almost there. Woo hoo, I was about to have company. Dad did get there about 10am and we chit-chatted until Jenn arrived from
London around noon. From there it was another hour or so to La Tonnellerie (mom/dad’s hotel if you don’t know already). Around 2pm I had finally arrived. That made it almost 26 hours of traveling. Again, OUCH!
Mom was there to welcome us at La Tonnellerie with a nice lunch. After lunch it was nap time for me; Jenn passed out too. I woke up around 5pm since I had to workout (P90X). It was tough, but I talked myself into it. It felt really good to workout; actually woke me up for the rest of the night. Dad brought us down to "La Cave" for some fine wine drinking. I had been down there before, but Jenn had never. He let her choose any bottle from his private reserve (which has been nicely depleted through the years). The three of us thoroughly enjoyed a 1989 Chateau Margaux. That evening, mom, dad, Jenn and I hung out.
The next day we were up around 10am. We had thought about going to visit a castle or two, but for understandable reasons I was dead tired. So instead I went back to sleep after breakfast and hanging out. Jenn ended up napping too (why was she tired? She’d been in Europe for over a week now). We woke up from our nap and had a late lunch, hanging out with the my parents. Late afternoon I talked Jenn into joining me for my P90X workout. Of course it had to be the hardest one, Plyometrics. She kicked butt though. We got ready for dinner and were joined by my cousin Greg who had come down since we were taking him to the south the next day. We all ate and then headed up to the King’s Lair (Dad’s apartment) to watch France win a Euro 2012 qualifying game (amazing I know). We ended up consuming quite a bit of red wine that night, so sleep was quite easy. Tomorrow, the travel continued to the French Riviera.
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