Aug 1: A Day for “Bougnates”

Couldn’t resist another quick dip in the pool this morning; when is the next time we’re likely to have our own private backyard pool? Thane joined in today too; he had chosen to stay dry yesterday.

Bit of a scramble leaving the property; our hosts informed us they had another booking arriving at noon, and checkout would need to be 10 am, but we had been counting on being ready by 11. Despite that our hosts were very gracious, and even gave us a 25th anniversary parting gift and took our contact info, inviting us to visit them someday at their other home in Norway!

More fun driving through rural Provence roads to get to the highway back to Marseille. Returned our rental car at 1 pm sharp! We had train tickets to Paris for 3pm, but we were able to exchange them for 2pm instead, getting us into Paris earlier. 3 hours on the TGV train (très grand vitesse = very high speed), a journey that would take over 8 hours by car. Transferred from Gare Lyon to Gare du Nord via Metro; we were unbelievably squished in with our full packs and seemingly all of Paris riding too.

Checked into our hotel (Hotel Richmond); somewhat sketchy, but very near to train station where we depart for London in the morning.

Lovely dinner at La P’tite Bougnate restaurant, including French onion soup! (Bougnate refers to someone who leaves the country life to move to the big city - kind of like we did today! In the context of the restaurant, it conjures the image of home cooking). Thane also tried a couple of classic French dishes: croque madame (like croque monsieur but with an egg on top) and crepes Suzette (supposed to be with rum sauce and flambéed at your table, but apparently they torched it in advance in the kitchen - bit of a letdown there).

Back to hotel in our 3 separate rooms - numbers 31 (Luke & Faith), 54 (Thane), and 66 (Beth & Reid). Our room was initially number 10, but that was changed when we discovered the lock on the door didn’t work at all - you could open the door without a key. Mom’s heart went a little pitter-pattery at the thought of the family split on 3 different floors, but our kids are travel pros at this point.