Fourth Form of Madness

This morning we left Paris. After getting up early and cleaning up the flat (18m2 really doesn’t take that much to clean) we were greeted by Florence the flat caretaker and undoubtedly the quirkiest woman in Paris, who after giving the flat a very quick once over, declared it okay and returned our 500 euros bond. Actually the only hard thing about cleaning up the flat was making the bed in the loft. It’s actually quite hard to make a bed when you can’t stand upright.

Then it was on the Metro to Gare de Lyon to pick up the rental. My husband had been giving me pep talks all the night before about how I should be rote learning the directions from Hertz at Gare de Lyon to get us out of Paris the quickest and without killing ourselves in the process. I thought he was joking, now I wish I had listened. After negotiating our way to freedom from the underground car park we were spat out onto a busy Parisian street and I froze…………I didn’t know what street we were on, what turn we should take, my right from my left etc. Luckily husband had rented a sat nav at the last moment. Finally it started working and although we were heading in totally the wrong direction and on totally the wrong motorway it started to lead us back on track. Husband advised that I best keep quiet for a bit when I suggested that perhaps the sat nav had us on the wrong the road.

Then it came to finding Monet gardens. After several loops of a random country town, one in which we weren’t sure what side of the road we were meant to be on, the good old sat nav lead us to the beautiful gardens. There is such a peace about the place. It looks exactly like his paintings and I was tempted to hold up a bottle of lemonade and look through it to see if I could reproduce the effect of his paintings (as suggested by our friend Blair).

Then it was onto Honfleur. Finding Honfleur was easy, finding our hotel which we had booked the night before on the internet was not. We drove up and down and up and down and a little bit of round and round, until finally we found it tucked away from the main road with absolutely no signage to indicate it was there. The mood in the car was not pleasant and we carried it into reception. Poor husband had been stressed out by the driving on the wrong side, the unknown bizarre road rules and on top of that he was poorly with a sore throat. We went to our room and promptly wished we hadn’t found it. Husband described it as the most soulless room he had stayed in which is no mean feat as he is from Invercargill. It was there on in referred to as zombieland. No more booking from internet. From now on we just show up.

To calm poor husband’s shattered driving nerves we decided to treat ourselves to a seafood dinner around the port. After much reading of menus and debate we settled for Frichti e Vue Bassin. Our last night in Paris we had gone to Le Petite Marche. I then wrote a bad review on google because I thought it was bad service and very average food. However, I now know what bad service and average food is. Things started off okay with a wonderful mix of seafood for starters. Long wait but eventually main came which I thought was quite average, mussels in white wine sauce, but were served with excellent chips hee hee. We asked for wine, none came. Infact for the very longest time nothing came at all. As we watched people come and go, we were left waiting and we still had desserts and coffee to go on our meal deal. We had been sitting out the front of the restaurant but it had become to cold and we had discovered that not only had poor husband had a sore throat, but now he also had quite an upset stomach. We moved inside to get warm and hopefully for them to remember us and serve us. They were less than happy to see us. When we finally got through and paid our bill they didn’t bring us our change back. By this stage we couldn’t be bothered waiting any longer, it had almost been 3.3 hrs.

Returned to Zombieland to discover the room is freezing and no extra blankets. I had a hot shower for about an hour (whoops) and jumped into bed to write this blog using the free wifi (Zombieland has it’s perks). Poor husband is passed out next to me with his stomach making loud gurgly noises. It just isn’t a holiday until husband has had gastro. Oh hang on…. I think that was mine as well…………………………….