WEDNESDAY 6th JUNE 2012

OUR EUROPEAN TOUR BEGINS

As I am writing this a couple of days late, I have discovered that on our tour there is very little time for blogging! Our first few days have been full on and from here on I am going to abbreviate the TravelPod a fair bit for fear that it will be impossible to remember things if I take ages to write it and get too far behind!

Our first day with the Trafalgar European Discoverer was a huge one! Eighteen hours after jumping on the bus in Earls Court at 6am, we were still seeing the night lights of Paris at midnight! Phew!
In between we had driven through the beautiful county of Kent on route to Dover, met our Tour Director Victor Cartin, started to meet our 45 other travel companions and caught the crossed the English Channel! At that was before eleven o'clock! Had a funny moment when Victor was asking us our names and when he got to Den he called him Guiness instead of Dennis! Pretty apt really!
We luckily got an early sailing than planned and the crossing, luckily for Mumsie, was very flat, the only rough patch being when customs chose my case to get out of the bus and have x-rayed! It was only a minor hitch and we were soon through the check point and onto the ferry!
Our first sights of France were the kilometre long lines of trucks waiting to cross to England, but quickly we were impressed with the great roads, lovely neat farms and little villages!
We had a stop for lunch at one of the numerous truckstops, our first chance to order a cafe au lait or something else in French! Luckily most of the staff spoke English!
Victor is a very well organized fellow, as he should be after working for Trafalgar for 26 years, and he spent a long time giving us details of what we could expect etc.
Our travel companions are a mix bag of ages, from early twenties to early seventies I'd reckon, with mostly Aussies, a couple of Kiwis, Americans and South Africans! Hopefully we will all mix into a good group!
By around 3pm we were on the outskirts of Paris, passed Charles De Gaule Airport and on the ring road into the City! Bit shocked that our first impressions were of graffiti on everything, filthy dirty roadsides and ugly, dirty old buildings! And awful traffic jams!
Victor was quick to point out that this was pretty typical of the outer parts of Paris, and that it was the central city that was so famous and beautiful!
We arrived at our hotel much later (Mmmmmm reserve judgement on this one!) and found that our rooms were not ready and the typical French staff were not really all that concerned!!! We managed to coerce them into opening the bar and managed to get a Corona each!
The rooms were dim, dark and pretty awful really - not a good start - but we settled in then wandered down the road a bit to a shopping centre and managed to order KFC in French, then came back to catch a evening tour of Paris, including a River Seine cruise!
Again the traffic held us up for ages, but our first glimpses of Paris proper soon got rid of the nasty ideas of the place, to be replaced with growing excitement and wonder!
The Eiffel Tower, Champs Elysee Concorde Square, Notre Dame etc all suddenly here in front of us! Bloody amazing!
We caught our cruise and sat there spellbound as the history of this ancient city unfolded in front of us! The lights of the city were just coming on and as our cruise ended at 10pm we stopped close to the Eiffel Tower and watched the lights begin to flash all over it as they do each hour after dark!
The next two hours were spent trawling the streets, seeing all the famous buildings etc, the shopping streets, with Gucci etc and anything else you could imagine! We even stopped on the Champs Elysee to get photos of the Arc de Triumph and drove the walled gates of the Louvre!
It was amazing to see people still dining and coffee-ing at midnight! The shops still open! Wowser! And we have all this crap about unrestricted shopping hours at home! Just shows the power of a large population!
It was way after midnight when we finished and we crashed out in the thankfully clean and comfy beds at the hotel very quickly!