Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Good, The Bad, And The Beautiful!

We started our trip to Paris off with a bang.....Remember those storms that rolled through 2 weekends ago? Well were caught in them! We left Saturday morning for the Charlotte airport and was suppose to fly to Atlanta for a short layover and then to NY, and on to Paris. But Oh No........ it could not be so simple. We did make it to Atlanta....barely. We had a really bumpy flight on a medium size plane....This was Joel's first time flying and I felt so bad for the poor kid! He was shaking and his teeth were chattering the whole flight.... Thank goodness that was a short flight! Once we arrived in Atlanta our flight was delayed twice to NY because of the weather being so bad, which caused us to miss our flight in NY to Paris. So we had to stay the night in Atlanta...ugh...ugh...ugh... I wanted to cry! The other great news was they could not pull our luggage off the plane and it would still travel to NY. Nice huh!!!! We did get a direct flight to Paris from Atlanta so we skipped NY all together. But, our flight was not until 3:15 on Sunday so that meant we would not arrive in Paris until Monday! Waa....A whole day lost in PARIS!!! By this time I was not a happy camper.... I kept checking to make sure our luggage would be there waiting for us by the time we got there and they kept checking and saying it SHOULD..... We finally arrived in Paris early Monday morning and guess what???? No luggage...what a surprise! So we filed a claim and sat in a office for over an hour after we waited almost an hour for our luggage at the baggage claim...and no luggage came. Big surprise! A sweet French lady in the office started checking around for us and finally  after another hour said I think I have good news for you but we have to wait and see....A flight from NY had just landed and she said it should be on that flight. At this point I was not holding my breath.. She told us to go to the baggage area again and sure enough our luggage came out... Torn up and filthy but there! I said some Thanks Yous to The Lord and felt like I had just been given a miracle!!! So then we headed to find the metro and head to our hotel. First, Ihad to wait in another line for another hour for our visitor passes (those were for the metro and the buses for 5 days.) Way cheaper then a Taxi....

We got off at a stop near our hotel and when we popped out of the ground this is what we saw..........



The Notre Dame....It was a bit overwhelming popping out of a dark tunnel and seeing beautiful building everywhere we looked. We just stood there with out mouths open for a while. (this picture was taken with my small camera because my good one was packed away.) Then we started to try and find our hotel which ended up being about and hour to an hour and a half. No one new were the street to our Hotel was...no one. We had Lots of luggage that we were totting around. We were tired, grumpy, and 6 hours ahead of schedule which meant no sleep. The maps did not help other then we were in the right area, our street was not on any of the maps. Karlton would leave me and Joel with all the luggage while he would go look and then I took a turn with no luck. Finally, I went to a hotel and they printed us off a google map and after 30-40 min. Karlton found it...... At this time I was about to fall over....While we were waiting on Karlton to come back Joel and I got something to eat at a Bakery. 

 This is where Karlton left us while he tried to find the hotel.... At least it was pretty!





Once he finally found the hotel it was only about 2 blocks from where we were standing lol.... It was in an alley with no rd sign. We were so happy to check into our cute little hotel even though it was a day late ;0)!
Praise God we made it safe and sound and in one piece!

BTW...We Loved our little boutique hotel! Hotel Central Saint Germain. It was immaculately clean!


 

Stay Tuned ......LOTS more pictures to come..........

1 comment:

Mom said...

Beautiful pictures of the buildings and scenery!