Travel lessons learned...

Our two days at Jamie's place were delightful. It was nice for a short time not to have an agenda other than relaxing at her beautiful Czech estate. Our last night some of Carrie's English students made us a traditional Czech food. It was sooooo good. Pork and dumplings covered in a creamy vegetable sauce. YUM. The teenagers were so respectful too. Here they had already spent hours cooking for us, then the passed the dishes around and cleared our plates when we were done. PS, I'm getting the recipe. :-)

I took a short nap after dinner to eventually be disturbed by two crazy women jumping on me yelling, “come play with us!” Uh... ok yeah. I was in such a food coma from lots of stick to your ribs Czech food a little sleep felt great. I needed the short shut-eye break. My only regret about it was that I didn't get to say goodbye to Carrie, who had retired to bed before I got up. Bye Carrie! I don't doubt we'll see you again soon. Keep on Czechin' on sister!

The night got later and Hemingway and I had to get packed for our big day of travel ahead of us to France. I unfortunately ended up staying up all night with Jamie, Jillian and Cain. I only say unfortunately because I paid the price trying to sleep on long stints of various transportation.

We left the castle at 4am when our ride came to take us to the airport in Prague. We fly Sky Europe to Paris which was a particularly miserable flight. We were seating at row 11, which does not recline because of being the row in front of the exit row. Then the row in front of us reclined and I was a sleepy sardine for the entire flight. Except I couldn't sleep being packed in there so tight. Row 11 is not where you want to be on a 747-400. Travel lesson learned #1.

We get to Paris and navigate to the baggage, getting our bags fairly easy. Now we need to get to the train station via bus. We get a ticket for the bus and say “bonjour” to folks we encountered, also trying to learn how to say the name of the train station. We maybe should of done this ahead of time. Hmmm...

Hemingway slept for most of the bus ride to the train station. I was looking around at all the crazy stuff in Paris. At one point we did see the foggy outline of the Eiffel tower We saw more McDonalds, (in every town we've been in so far except Chotoviny), a HUGE Pfizer building and the bustling of French city life everywhere. I kept thinking about Bugs Bunny being in Paris and all the sites he took in while here. Bugs of course being my first reference I can remember in my life to Paris.

We make it to the train station and good lord is it crazy. Its not organized chaos. Its chaos. I was surprised to see military soldiers in fatigues with machine guns patrolling the station. The station is essentially outdoors too, so it was windy and cold in all the chaos of the trains going in and out and all the people milling around till they sprint to a train.

It seems to be a popular method of boarding transport in Europe to wait till the last second to post ina public place where you are supposed to be and then the entire mob bolts at the same time to the same place, knocking over everything in their path. My rolling bag is incrdibly unstable and I had a very hard time keeping up with Hemingway and her little bag once we (and a gazillion others) found out what train we were supposed to be on from the big board.

On the first five hour train ride though the French countryside I began to realize that our travel plans were less than efficient. For some reason we couldn't fly directly into the any town in southern France from the Czech Republic and ended up flying into the north end of the country to take a day traveling south by train. Travel lesson #2 was when you need to traverse an entire country on a short schedule, use another plane. It would be like flying from Spokane to Chicago so you could take a train to New Orleans. Not exactly the best move.

We did get to see a lot of the French countryside and rode right though the heart of the wine country. Saw a million vineyards in Bordeaux and all alone western France. It was beautiful. We also took in some podcasts, one being of Bill McKibben on KQED's Forum. Last time we were in Europe we read his book "Deep Economy." This was interesting cause we saw a bunch of big wind generators and also some nuclear plants. Bill is amazing and I would plead for you all at some point to visit 350.org. We also took in some Bill Mahar and then some John Hodgeman reading “of actuaries and their tattoos.” As you can see we keep well informed.

Another train transfer and we finally arrive in Carcasone and are greeted by Carole, Gary, and Dylan. YEA! A short walk from the train station gets us to the hotel, and we meet up with Ixtla, Juergen and Carola. Yea Again!

We all went out to a FABULOUS dinner at a basement restaurant Carola and Juergen found in a back alley somewhere. OMG, the food was amazing and we did it up. I had duck, but there was all kinds of dishes on the table and everything was sampled by everyone. I was told I must have been talking to Craig, cause I sat next to Carole and ordered something she didn't like. I didn't exactly know this ahead of time but I guess it worked out ok. She got the lamb and very graciously still let me try some.

The long day lead to an early night. No bars or anything. I just CRASHED. Now up up and have rented some expensive air time on a wireless network so I can upload to the blog. We're about to eat breakfast and then go get our boat, which we'll be on for the next four days. I will be blogging on the boat but I might be off line for a while. I will haul the computer into towns we stop in and see if I can find an internet cafe. Keep watching the blog, but I'm waring you there may be some downtime in the near future. We've had such great luck with internet access so far. Off to the boat.

Johnny Canal.