Christmas Vacation Begins

After an evening scarce on sleep due to excitement, church “picking and a playing” and Christmas with our parents, we awoke to the day we’ve been dreaming about for months – hip hip hooray it’s Christmas Vacation.

We spent the morning at church, and then loaded all the pets to Granny Bergstresser’s house. The good thing is we got to the airport 2 hours before our flight (even though the suggested was 3 hours) and the woman at the gate offered us an earlier flight to Atlanta. We decided to take the gamble because our layover, after many changes in schedule, was only 1 hour and 6 minutes. Believe me, unless you know exactly what you are doing that is not enough time. Our flight was a “connection flight” which basically means a tiny plane that where can’t take carry-on luggage. We had to “check it” at the gate and they returned it to us when we arrived. The flight was short and beautiful.

Checking to make sure our flight was happening.

We had a couple of hours to kill in Hotlanta, and after we spent about an hour trying to get to the correct concourse, we sat down for dinner at TGI Fridays.



Funny how the forks were real but the knives were plastic.





Beer head.



Before we knew it we were boarding the plane to Paris. We’d been worried for a couple days about the epic storms in Europe, but turns out for whatever reason we were able to make it in. Sadly, Jason and I weren’t very productive at sleeping on the plane. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to sleep soundly on an airplane, but I did get to watch a couple movies The Grown Ups and Despicable Me. The rest of the time I read trashy magazines, people-watched and listened to my iPod. I had been so excited about Delta announcing free internet but turns out there was no wi-fi on our plane. Figures, right?! Let me also not forget to mention we were surrounded by a mixed bag of people, but the ones that stuck out were the guys from the oil rig in Texas. Wow were they obnoxious. My favorite passengers were two small children with infectious laughs who were totally excited about all the snow.

We landed in Paris, no problems, although I was slightly worried seeing all the snow and ice.

The runway we taxied in on.

The plane hoping to leave.

Next on our list was to get our navigo découverte (week metro pass), train into the city and find our apartment. I’ll not post too much about that adventure, but let’s just say we experienced 4 beggars on the train, one of which was an accordion player, and lots of turning around. We had never spent much time in Gare du Nord and I don’t plan on it in the future. So we get to the first stop to get our key and then we head on to our apartment. Most of the snow is just slushy mess and not much fun in the city. We arrived and sat for a minute and then all the sudden I realized that this wasn’t the apartment we had pictures of. So we reviewed all our documents: most say apartment 2 but the one that had directions to pick up the key said apartment 1. An interesting call to the owner and another long walk led us to our key and a quick stop at the market. At this point we were exhausted, hungry and wet from all the snow melting. We enjoyed hot showers, some bread and cheese and took a nap.

18th arrondissement



A Russian tour group. :)



Hooray for 5 flights of stairs 4x's.

Now it’s 10pm Paris time and we’re moderately awake. It’s going to take us a little bit to get used to the time change but I have to say even though I was super cranky walking through the streets because I was so tired and hungry, I’m really glad to be here with Jason. It’s a great city and we’re already having adventures.