Made it to Paris....

Monday June 16th (in case you didn't know the day/date, we've kind of lost track!) and we're in Paris; which means we survived our week/weekend in the "French Countryside" and Le Mans and didn’t get superbly lost on the way back to Paris! Watching the 24 was quite thrilling, we got back to the track on Sunday and it was kind of a disaster, all the campers had pretty much wreaked havoc on the place, trash and debris everywhere.. Just messy. I guess you can’t expect a lot more from a quarter of a million people chugging down beer as quickly as the lines will allow them to.

We got to watch the finish of the race, which ended quite closely if you figure the difference between 1st and second places in many of the classes was only 4 minutes (four minutes out of 24 hours really isn’t bad)! Audi won LMP1 (who-hooo!), Aston Martin won GT1 (not Corvette, even though this was the race they had been running the entire ALMS season for : sucky for them), I didn’t have a favorite for LMP2, but YAY!!! GT2 was won by Risi Compitizione Ferrari (I’ve seen these guys run at Mid Ohio and always been a fan!!!).

After the race as soon as the last car was around the track they opened a few of the gates to track, and madness occurred, I felt like I was doing the running of the bulls to get to the Podium to watch the trophy presentations. We got pretty close and it was thrilling to watch all the drivers/teams who had driven for 24 hours straight celebrate their victory, and you could just see their exhaustion but total excitement. When they played the American anthem Aaron and I were pretty hyped, as well as many other folks, so maybe more Americans around then we realized. Even after driving that long the drivers still had spirit and were crowd pleasers. Ron Fellows came out to the podium carrying HIS camera, taking pictures of the crowd taking pictures of him… it was quite amusing, and then he proceeded to just rile up the crowd who loved every second of it!

After the race we did some “shopping” and scored some cool apparel and souvenirs!

Then we headed back to the bed and breakfast in hopes of catching an early meal and returning at a decent time before our journey back to Paris… well that didn’t happen. EVERY restaurant was closed (assuming cuz it was Sunday), and so we thought about just going back to the hotel and eating our peanut butter and bread staples we had bought at the Super U (grocery). We got back, packed, and kind of vegged, we figured at that point to go down and check with our host to see if they could order us a pizza, we should have known better since they sell dinner (upon reservation, which we hadn’t made) and were told, “too late.” Even though we had seen the lil pizza deliver guys whizzing around on scooters in the area, we just didn’t know where they whizzed from!

So in hopes of randomly getting lucky and finding something we headed back into the main town, this time the same places that had been closed and miraculously open. Looking at the hours it seemed that opened later on Sunday (which confused the crap out of us, but we were super happy anyway). We got pizzas, mine plain cheese, and Aaron with ham (they REALLY love their ham in this area of France, not sure if that is how it is everywhere). No luck on translating pepperoni. We happily enjoyed our meals and headed back to the bed and breakfast. Charged up cameras, tried to find a wireless signal (no luck), and called it a night.

Today we navigated our way back to Paris, the road signs were great, really easy to understand, and just everything well marked, what could have been a nightmare of a drive was actually a super easy one! Thankfully. I guess when you’re charging 18.5 Euros toll on about 150Km’s you can afford to make everything great and nice!

We returned our rental car and spent about 45 minutes in line at the train counter to get our selves figured out for the next part of our trip. Our train reservations for the French Grand Prix to the Nevers, France (google it) area have been made as well as our train from there back to Paris, to Nurenburg, uh.. yeah not where we want to go! Oops, so we’re going to have to sort that part out later. The lady at the station was great, super helpful and explained everything, in English! She even worked 10 minutes past her shift to help us out. But feeling accomplished we took a cab (yeah, lugging our stuff on the metro just didn’t seem like a “fun” idea. We got to the taxi stand only to find the line was about ½ and hour on that, but we had committed to it at that point and just waited it out. We got to ride in a “Picasso” Van and had a really crazy taxi ride to our hotel (I think all taxis are insane, not matter what country you’re in!). Lucky for us the hotel we pricelined was as pimptastic as I had expected, just getting into the lobby I was like YAY! Really nice lobby, and landscaping, it’s in the business district of Paris, maybe 10 blocks or so to the Eiffel Tower. We check in, get our room key, ride the elevator a little longer then we needed to because forgot to scan our card in the elevator to let it know we wanted the 5th floor. Once we got to our room it was great to put down the bags and just sit! The room is really cool, and sleek. So sleek, that we didn’t know how to turn on any of the lights!

I located a house keeper who showed me that there is a slot when you walk in the door where you insert your room card and it is how the lights and such are activated in the room… wow. High tech! We went from the likes of Canfield, or East Sparta in Ohio straight to New York City or Chicago in terms of the differences in our bed and breakfast in Le Mans to the hotel in Paris! You can see the tip of the Eiffel tower from the hotel, and if you got up to the pool level you can see the whole thing!

Since today was a travel day we haven’t done too much, needed time to unwind. We ate lunch at Mc Donald’s about 2:30 cuz we were dying of hunger and it was the only thing we could see from our hotel that was close. Yes, it’s lame, but god it is nice to know what you’re ordering and what it will taste like!

After “lunch” we took a nap in the middle of the afternoon. Woke up refreshed and ready to explore. We walked a few blocks, found some local restaurants, and settled for a place that served pasta! We decided to carbo load for energy and had spaghetti. Quite enjoyable. We went to a BP quickie mart to get some beverages, Powerade & Orange Juice for the hotel, and now we’re just relaxing and unwinding.

Tomorrow will be a touring day and we’ll surly take lots of pix.
Speaking of pix, seems like we won’t be sharing them as soon as we thought due to lack of free internet (right now I’m typing this is Word and will copy paste to the blog). We bought a few hours of internet access at the hotel and are trying to use it sparingly.

I still haven’t caught the blog up on the few days in Le Mans but overall, I think the pictures will speak for themselves when we are able to share them, and this is already really long, so I don’t want to bore everyone to death!