my big adventure - our paris apartment

We've been back from our Big Adventure for a couple days now, so I think I should finish this out. Without internet access in Paris, I wasn't able to update the trip, and when we got home, I filled JD and the girls in with the rest of the trip, so I didn't see a need to do it here since that's mainly who I was writing for. Except for my need to finish what I started.

Our road trip from Kandern to Paris on Sunday was blessedly less eventful than our trip in the opposite direction, except for some traffic jams we encountered on the German Autobahn. That reminds me: when it was my turn to drive,  I maxed out at 170 kilometers per hour. Last time I had driven on the Autobahn, I got up to 140 kilometers per hour and when I got home, I was so disappointed to find out that it was only 87 mph. This time I made sure that I could say I drove over 100 mph. In fact, I went 105 mph! ("I have a need , a need for speed.")

In Paris we stayed at my mom's friend's apartment. She and her husband are living in Paris for a year while he works on a job with IBM there. Unfortunately they were not in Paris when we planned to be there, but were nice enough to make copies of their keys and let us crash there without them. We dropped off the rental car at the airport, rode a bus to the Paris Opera House, dragged our suitcases down several flights of stairs to the Metro, rode underground to our stop at Ecole Militaire which thankfully had an escalator up, then walked several blocks in the rain to the apartment. After we successfully entered the codes to get into the building and piled into the tiny elevator, my mom said, "Now... which floor are they?"

Each apartment was the whole floor, and there were eight floors, so we had eight options. Mom thought that it was either three or five. So we tried one, then the other. The key didn't seem to work, but her friend had said that it was a bad copy and you just needed to keep trying. Only after my mom rang both of their doorbells did we realize that it was 10:40 pm. Fortunately no one answered. We finally decided we had no option but to check each floor and see if the key worked. She was certain it wasn't floor one or two. We started with floor six: no luck.

Then we went up to the seventh floor and the key fit! After all three of us tried a turn at turning it, we finally got the door to open. We headed straight to the window to check out the view of the Eiffel Tower from the apartment. It was quite a view!

 Our first glimpse of the Tower.

The view the next morning out the kitchen window.