Maybe the End of the Marvelous Paris Tale?

Hopefully I can finish up the tale of our adventures in Paris with this entry, then I can move on to more current things.

One thing I forgot to mention about Friday night: a mis-dialled phone call at 9.45 p.m. I needed to call our bank back in Los Alamos and had tried using the cell phone since the kids were all asleep, but the lady on the other end couldn't hear me very well, so I decided just to use the phone in our hotel room. I sat there and dialled the number for the bank, saying the number under my breath as I pressed each button. Then I looked at the number I had dialled on the screen of the phone and didn't notice anything amiss. But when the lady on the other end answered "Hello?" instead of the usual spiel that the bank people say, I knew I had dialled wrong. This is how the conversation went:

unknown person: Hello?
me: Is this not LANB?
u.p.: No. That number is 662-5171.
me: Gwen?
u.p.: Yes?
me: It's April!
Gwen: Nolen?
me: Yes!!

I had dialled the Adams number by mistake. I think all of the 1s in their number and 1s in the bank number confused me. I had just dialled the number correctly not 2 minutes earlier. But we had a teeny tiny short phone call before we hung up and I called the bank. It was a nice surprise for both of us, I think!

Saturday morning dawned. We had decided that Steve and I, our kids, and our niece Connor would go to the Eiffel Tower and do a little touristy shopping, while the Baldridges, Lynette, and Nancy would go to Versailles. We were supposed to meet back at our hotel at 2.30 to gather our luggage and go to the train station for our 4.00 train back to London.

We managed to sleep in a bit before children started stirring, then we got everyone dressed, got our stuff packed up, checked out and headed to a tres chic Paris restaurant for breakfast - the Golden Arches. Again. But that was fine because everyone was very happy with the food. They don't play the Monopoly game at McDonald's like they do at home - they play Uno. So we were peeling little papers off our cups and stuff and Connor got one that said something like "un plat metal." With my nonexistent French, I decided it meant "metal plate." What kind of prize is a metal plate? We talked about it for a while trying to figure out what it was, then Connor decided she would just take it up to the counter. She came back with a metal tray (about the size of a piece of paper) that had the Coca-Cola logo on it. We had a nice chuckle about it and she decided to give it to Lynette since she has Coke running through her veins.

We decided to ride the Metro (subway) to the Eiffel Tower. Steve bought 10 tickets for us to use throughout the day to get us there and back. We are thoroughly unimpressed with the Paris Metro. Lots of stairs. No escalators. Not usually a problem, but we had a stroller that we ended up carrying up and down stairs. We're getting this stroller carrying thing down to an art. Plus you can't just drive the stroller through the turnstiles at the Metro - you have to go through the special gate-thing they have for strollers. That is, you go through them when there's an employee there to man the station to push the right button to open the stupid thing. At one point we had to lift the stroller up and over a half-wall because there wasn't an employee to open the gate for us. Very annoying.

So we get to the Eiffel Tower stop and emerge into a lovely fall day. But I think Audrey has already decided that today was going to be one of her "wobbly" days. (To "throw a wobbly" is to throw a fit in Brit speak.) We walked about half a block to the base of the Eiffel Tower and got stopped at one point by a young lady who approached us asking, "Do you speak English?" She handed Steve a postcard-looking thing that was written in English claiming that she was from one of those Eastern European countries ending in "stan" and that she needed money to get a ticket for her brother and/or father to come join her. Whatever. We gave her a handful of change. There were lots of those types of girls wandering around accosting tourists. When I saw one of them coming, I did everything in my power to encourage Audrey's wobbly of the moment so that the beggar/panhandler wouldn't bug us. Wobblies are good for something, I guess.

I was surprised by a couple of things at the Eiffel Tower: 1 - it's BROWN and not black, and 2 - the wind just rips through at the base! We decided after seeing the lines that we weren't going to wait the minimum 45 minutes to go up. Plus Audrey and Julie couldn't have gone up past the first level anyway, so that means that one of us would have had to stay with them while the other went up. I really wanted to go up with Steve, so we decided to pass. We'd just take pictures. Steve was impressed that his pictures of the tower turned out so well because he wanted to get the names of the French scientists that are on it. The close-up picture is the current wallpaper on the laptop. I like it because it looks like lace to me.

So we decided that we would let the kids ride the Eiffel Tower Carousel across the street from the tower, then we would take a walk along the Seine. They had a great time, then we headed down along the river.

This was where things really started to get weird. As you can see in this picture, there is a wall along the pathway beside the Seine.

Steve was trying to get a nice picture of us looking over the river. Instead he got a post-incident photo. Audrey had tried to jump up on the wall and managed to chip her front top tooth. This is the same tooth she chipped last November. It looks worse now. Plus she managed to knock the other front top tooth forward and loose. All teeth were still in her mouth, but one was pointy and jagged and the other was sticking out far enough that she could stick her lip under it and look like a little mini hillbilly. Yikes. So we're all looking at her in this picture because she has just hurt herself and is starting to cry.

Not 3 minutes after this as we were walking, I stopped to help Caleb with his scarf. As I was straightening up, a lady came up to me and said while holding out a man's gold band, "Is this yours?"

This is where I'm going to leave the story for now since I need to get dinner on the table.