Paris 2024 - Day 0-5 (July 17th) Cupertino to Nice

Welcome to the journal of our 2024 trip to France. I can't believe that it has been six years since I wrote one of these! After two Olympics at home due to COVID, we are excited to be finally attending our 14^th Olympic Games. Since we are now retired, this will be our first Olympics where we were able to stay from beginning to end. In fact, Beth and I decided that if we were going all the way to France, we should see a little more of the country, as Beth had never been there and I had only visited twice for a total of about 12hrs; once in 1967 when I was visiting my grandparents in London and came across the English Channel on the hovercraft to the town of Boulogne-sur-Mer and the second time in 1995 as a stop on a business trip from San Jose to Cairo in my boss’s twin-engine business jet. I should point out that the first time was not a pleasant visit as the locals were quite rude to this 12-year-old trying to use his best 6^th grade French to be understood. It was only much later than I found that they were rude because they thought that we were English and not American! Anyway, this gave me some trepidation as we planned for this trip.

We had always wanted to see the Tour de France bicycle race and to see some of the French wine growing regions. The Olympics provided the perfect opportunity. Since Paris was getting ready for the Olympics, the Tour de France could not finish in Paris on the Champs Élysées as usual. Instead, the organizers moved the final two stages to Nice in the south of France on the Cote d’Azur. Stage 20 would start in Nice and go up into the mountains and the final stage 21 would be an individual time trial starting in Monaco and going to Nice. This gave us an opportunity to see both a start and finish. Since the Tour de France was scheduled to end on July 21^st and our first Olympic event was not until July 25^th, we decided to spend a couple of days in the Provence wine growing region. As an added bonus, Elisabeth and Heinz Rippstein, my long-ago bosses, have a home about an hour south-west of Nice on the Mediterranean and invited us to come by and visit. After our stay in Nice and Provence, we would turn in our car and take the high-speed TGV train from Marseille to Paris just in time to find our Airbnb and meet up with Sean, who was flying in from San Francisco on July 24^th.

So that was the plan. Bright and early on July 17^th, Sean drove us to foggy San Francisco International:

To cut costs, we’d booked out flights on United using frequent flyer miles. This resulted in Beth and I having separate itineraries (a fact that became important later on). It also meant that we had to change planes in Newark because that is where United’s only flight to Nice originated. This was okay because it broke what would have been an 11–12-hour flight to Paris into a 6- and a 7-hour flight.

The flight took off on time and everything was going fine until we were just east of Chicago. Then the plane took an abrupt turn to the right. A minute or two later, the pilot informed us that we were moving south to avoid strong thunderstorms in the metro-NY area. As we flew into West Virginia and started flying around in circles, the pilot informed us that all three metro-NY airports were still shut down due to storms and that we were going to land at Washington-Dulles to take on more fuel. We were not yet worried because we had a 2.5-hour layover in Newark. But after an hour and a half on the ground with no indication of when we were going to take off, it was clear that we were going to miss our connection.

We went up to the desk and the harried gate agent told us that since we were redirected to Dulles, they did not have control over our flight (Newark and San Francisco did) and that we would have to use the United app to get help with our flights. Of course, the storms had fouled up a lot of flights, so it took Beth more than an hour to reach a live body. As she was talking to this guy, things started to get weird. Suddenly, my boarding pass disappeared from the United app on my phone. A couple minutes later, Beth’s boarding pass also disappeared. While Beth was still working on reservations, I went up to the desk and asked for a hard copy of our boarding passes. When I returned, Beth told me that United had been able to get us on a flight from Newark to Zurich, Switzerland with a connection from Zurich to Nice the following day. We would still have to find a place to stay in Newark, but otherwise, everything was straightened out. That was until we went to reboard our flight. When we scanned our boarding passes, a bright red light went on. The gate agent was in a hurry to get the flight boarded and out of there because at this point, the flight crew was close to timing out. Once everyone else had boarded, the gate agent tried to figure out what was going on. She discovered that the United agent had apparently cancelled our current flight while making our new arrangements and because we had been diverted to Dulles, they did not have control of our flight and therefore could not put us back on it. We could not even buy our way back on because they did not have control. So, we watched our plane, and our bags disappear into the darkness.

The gate agents and their supervisor felt bad that they could not help, but they did give us vouchers for a taxi ride and a hotel room. It was interesting because the hotel voucher just said Hotel Voucher and an address in Manassas, Virginia. We went outside, got an Uber and headed off to the hotel. To try to keep my mind off the fact that the Uber driver was fighting to stay awake, I was fascinated that the Civil War battlegrounds of Manassas and Bull Run were both so close to Washington, DC. Fortunately, we arrived at the hotel, which turned out to be a Wyndam Gardens hotel. We were pretty tired at this point, but before we could go to sleep, we had to figure out how to get to Newark in time for our flight tomorrow. Due to all of the flight cancellations, there were no seats between Dulles or National to Newark, so the best option was to take an Amtrak train instead. This meant getting to Union Station in downtown Washington, DC. Fortunately, there was no shortage of seats and we were able to make reservations that would get us to Newark airport a couple of hours before our flight departed. The guy working the check-in desk at the hotel told us that the easiest way to get to Union Station was to take an Uber to the Fairfax Metro station and then take Metro to Union Station.

Since we failed to bring any extra clothes with us (this will not happen again!), the following morning we put our clothes back on, had breakfast, brushed our teeth with our free toothbrushes and toothpaste and headed off. The reason for making the trip this way became clear almost as soon as we got in the Uber car. Washington, DC beltway traffic at rush hour is ridiculous! Fortunately, the Uber driver had a express lane pass and we were able to get to Fairfax quickly. The Washington Metro is a lot like BART in the San Francisco Bay area so it was simple for us to buy tickets and get onto a train, and there were enough seats to allow us to sit down for our 45 minute ride.

The Union Station Metro station connects directly with the train station, so it was easy to get off of the Metro and find the platform for our train. Americans generally don’t get trains so we were somewhat concerned about whether our train would get us to Newark on time. But the staff has everyone line up to get ready for boarding for an on-time departure. It took a little time to find our assigned seats in the second car, but we settled down for our 3-hour trip. While we did see beautiful sections of the Bay, the view from the train was for the most part pretty boring. Beth spent the time reading and I worked on my database of known Olympic team pins. Before long, we arrived in Newark. In Newark, there is a light rail that takes people from the train station to the airport, so we checked in and got our boarding passes without difficulty. When we checked in, we explained the problems of the previous evening and asked whether our bags will be put onto this flight. The airline staff member assured us that the bags will follow us.

This flight is a red eye, so we eat dinner in the terminal and wait for the plane to board. One of the consequences of missing our previous flight was that our Economy Plus seats (and more importantly, their legroom) are long gone and we are crammed into the back of the plane. The flight itself was uneventful. We pass just to the south of Greenland, Iceland and Ireland, over the southern end of England and into central Europe. I had flown into Zurich previously, so it did not surprise me that the hills around the airport are pretty green and there are no typically rocky and snowy Alps visible.

We are a little early, so we have plenty of time to sit before going to find the gate for our flight to Nice. Just before we head to the gate, we hear a message over the public address that apologized that some flights were being delayed due to an IT problem. The status boards still show our flight on time so we head to the gate. The flight before ours is going to Oslo and boards normally. Then just before we were due to board, a message popped up for our flight saying “next info 13:10”. This is 20 minutes after our flight was due to depart so we go talk to the gate agent. She  informed us that our flight was going to be cancelled and that we should go upstairs to find an alternative trip. By the time that we got upstairs, the flight status board looks like this:

That is something like 35 flights cancelled at the same time. We find the line to the information desk:

We stayed in this line for over an hour only to find out that we had to go to the Swiss Airline reservation desk near the baggage claim. During that time, we learn that we are part of a worldwide IT shutdown caused by a bit of incorrect Microsoft code introduced by the internet security company CrowdStrike that is affecting worldwide society. While we are standing in the second line, we get texts from Swiss Airlines saying that they have put me on a morning flight to Nice in 2 days and that they have put Beth on a flight to Frankfurt, Germany tomorrow night followed by a morning flight to Nice the following day! It takes us a while to figure out that this is because we have two itineraries, so the airline does not know we are traveling together. By the time we get to the front of the line, we learn that while Swiss is in no way able to give hotel vouchers for we will have to find a hotel, but they will let us provide expense documentation for up to 200 euros. Of course, by the time that we get to that point, many of the hotel rooms are gone. We are able to get a room in the Hyatt Regency at the airport for a mere 370 euros/night. The agent tells us that all of the bags from cancelled flights are in baggage claim and that all computer systems are still down so that they would not be able to help us with our flights. They should have just put up a big sign saying that and we would have saved about 3 hours standing in lines!

I wish I had taken a picture, because baggage claim looked a lot like the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Imagine all of the bags from perhaps 50 flights on baggage carts filling all of the aisles between baggage claim stations. Written in paper are little tags indicating what flight the bags are from. We search everywhere, but do not find our bags. Eventually, we give up and head to the hotel.

At the hotel, we discovered what superior customer service is like. When we walk in, a hospitality person comes over and offers to get us ice cream while we wait for one of the front desk people to be available to confirm our reservation. When it is our turn, the woman at the front desk apologizes and tells us that while they know that we have a reservation, they don’t currently know how many rooms are available or whether they have been made up or not. With the exception of the still working payment system, they are trying to recreate everything else with paper. She explains that it will be some time before we can verify that we have prepaid or get into a room.  We sit down in the lobby and wait. After a while, a person comes over and says that we should go into a second line to verify payment and get our room keys. We are finishing up our ice cream while another person is directed to the same line, but the staff makes sure that we are allowed to keep our original position in the line. While we are standing there, we see someone chewing out the woman who had been helping us initially because she couldn’t just walk in and get a room. Rather than getting angry, she just accepted the abuse and again patiently explained the situation. I am not sure that I would have been able to maintain my cool in the same situation!

Finally, we get our room keys (they still work!!) and we head to our room. Now that we are well into our 3^rd day in the same clothes, Beth decides that she will go out and buy some underwear and socks at the mall next to the hotel. While she is out, she scouts for places to eat dinner. We are pretty jetlagged so we opt for a takeout meal at Pret a Manger (French for "Ready to Eat") and make plans to go back across the street to the airport in the morning to see if we can get a) tickets to Nice on the same flight and b) find out where our bags are.

We get up and have breakfast at Pret a Manger as well. Now that my brain is finally working, I remind Beth that she has an Apple air-tag and that we should be able to tell where her bag was. Then we head over to the airport to see what we can do. Our first stop is at the United check-in counter. The first person told us that they are really just vendors who work in Zurich for United, but she refers us to one of her colleagues who specializes in baggage and who formerly worked for United. After about 30 minutes, he confirmed what we had learned from the air-tag, that our bags were still in Newark. He also told us that United would wait until we arrive in Nice and file a missing bag report before they would send the bags to Nice.

Next stop was Swiss Airlines. The woman at the check-in counter referred us to the Swiss Airlines customer service desk. There, we talk to a nice young woman with the title Supervisor on her name tag. We told her that we hoped that today was going better than yesterday. She smiled and said that things were slowly getting better. We explained our story to her and that we would like to travel to Nice together. She said that she was amazed that we could be so cheerful after such a travel nightmare. Perhaps it is just age because I certainly would have been a lot less cheerful about the whole situation when I was younger, but it seems like you can’t control what happens to you, but you can control how you react to it. After a little while, she cancels our previous trips and gets us on the same flight to Nice the following morning and even gets us seats next to each other. Mission for the day accomplished! We walk back across the street and have focaccia at an Italian fast-food place.

While we were eating, our next task was to decide what to do with the rest of our “free” day. Beth found some things to do in Zurich, but I was still pretty tired, not to mention I was still wearing the same clothes for the 4^th day, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to be in public. The front desk had pointed out that there was a really nice little park that was part of the hotel/mall development. We decided to go to the park and walk around. The first thing we see is something that looks like a small chairlift. Apparently, the reason for the funicular is that the top of the hill in the center of the park is a great place to watch airplanes. But we take the stairs:

It is a pretty small park but has enough foliage to have some birds, so I turn on my Merlin app to do some audio birding. In a short time, we hear a Eurasian Blackcap, a Short-Toed Treecreeper, a European Serin and an Eurasian Tree Sparrow; all new additions to our life list. Along the way, we find a fire pit with long rods with metal spirals at the end. After thinking about it for a few minutes, Beth concludes that these are for toasting sausages. Who knew there was such a thing?! There is no shade at the top of the hill and Beth has the same amount of melanin as Snow White, so we don’t check out the view of the airport. It is now late afternoon, and I am starting to fade. We go back to our room for a short nap and then go out looking for dinner.

We choose a Japanese restaurant. The food is pretty good, but the interior is really interesting:

The combination of lanterns, mirrors and plants make the space really cool! But the view in the other direction has me mesmerized:

As you can see, it appears to be a building on a Japanese street. There is a band playing behind these shoji screens. But if you keep watching, you find that there is a whole story going on. It starts with a child who grows up and wants to become a Geisha. She falls in love with another woman (this picture is from their wedding) and the two of them work to raise enough money so that she can become a Geisha, and follows them as they get older and hire an apprentice of their own. We were only in the restaurant for about 45 minutes and the movie had not yet looped. I couldn’t take my eyes away from it! But we eventually headed back to the hotel. We are leaving very early, so we stop at the front desk – the same woman is there again! We tell her how happy we’ve been to stay here – it made a bad situation better and that we were impressed with how well the staff handled an equally bad situation. She thanked us and wished us safe travels.

Our flight departs at around 8 AM so we are up bright and early to get checked in for our flight. We have a slight sense of déjà vu as we are departing from the same gate as our cancelled flight, but this time we are loaded onto a bus - in Zurich, at least for local European flights, the planes park close to the runways and buses bring the passengers to the plane. I had been hoping that I could see some of the Alps during our flight, but there was too much cloud cover. After about an hour, we start our descent, pass out over the very blue Mediterranean and come back to land at the Nice airport.

The Nice airport appeared to be about the same size as San Jose airport but was much busier with all of the people coming and going from the Tour de France. On our way through from the gate, we see this:

Public art is always a good thing! We stop at baggage claim to file a missing baggage claim. With a little help in English from the agent, this was a completely automated procedure – just enter your name, address, original flight number, actual flight number, baggage tag numbers, etc. and you are given a claim number. Of course, they don’t tell you when you will get your bags!

That chore done; we head to the rental car counter. We are relieved to find out that our reservation is still there as we’ve already not showed up for two prior reservations due to our travel problems! The rental car counter is in one terminal, but the car is in a parking structure across the street from the other terminal. This requires a ride on the light rail that goes between the two terminals. It is pretty crowded and VERY humid, but we manage to find our car. The downside of missing these reservations is that we no longer have a medium sized electric vehicle. Instead, we have a big SUV which I gingerly navigate out of the garage and into traffic.

Our Airbnb hosts, who Beth had been communicating with during our whole saga, had told us that we should use Waze in order to navigate the road closures due to the Tour de France. We enter the street address, but don’t really understand when Waze says that it will take over an hour to get to our lodgings. Over the next 15-20 minutes of driving down tiny roads with many turns to avoid closed roads and the many, many spectators, it starts to become clear. We are on the north side of the Tour de France course and the place we are staying is on the south side of the course. This means that we have to make a 45-minute drive to Monaco and back in order to go around the beginning of the course and get to the other side. Most of the ride to Monaco is on a fast toll road, but the ride back is much more winding. This region is really mountainous, so we navigate switchbacks and tunnels and see some awesome views to get to our Airbnb. I don’t have any pictures of the drive, but here is the view when we arrived:

We park the SUV on a narrow one-way street that appears to be close to the Airbnb and go looking for it. There is a bakery on the corner and Beth texts our hosts to meet us there and show us where we should go. After a while, two young men come over, welcome us to France and bring us to their home. They know all about our travel disasters and give us a half bottle of wine, some dried tomato jam and some breadsticks as a gift, give us the keys and leave us to get settled in. I go back outside to unload the car. As I’m approaching the car, a woman walking a dog stops and asks if this is our car. When I say that it is, she tells me that because the car is so big and the road is so small, I’m certain to get ticketed or towed. I thank her and go back to tell Beth that I’ve got to go find another place to park. She says that she’ll go get us a late lunch at the bakery while I park the car.

All of the roads in this part of town near the harbor all seem to be one-way and many had payant on them which I interpreted as being paid parking. I found myself down by the harbor and found some spaces, but it wasn’t clear to me that this was public parking. Google maps said that there was a parking garage close by, but when I got close, I realized that the street that led to it was blocked off. I knew that I was getting close to the course and had the choice of doing a 180 right in front of a police car or going into a tunnel. I took the tunnel and quickly realized that I was again back on the north side of the course. I tried to find a parking garage. The first appeared to be associated with a supermarket and the hours were not clear. The second let me in, but I couldn’t find any free spaces inside (at least that would fit the boat I was driving) so went right back out. After trying in vain to find another way back across the course, I came to the conclusion that I would need to go to Monaco again. I pulled over and texted Beth about my situation. I did not have Waze on my phone, so she managed to get it installed remotely and then I did the whole trip over again. The only difference was that now the final stage of the Tour de France was underway so there was a lot more traffic, both on the way to Monaco and back again.

Finally, I got back to the right street, parked my boat in a big space with payant on it and walked back to our Airbnb. After hugging me, Beth handed me a baguette (long French bread) with jambon (ham) and I tried to relax. Part of me wanted to just sit there, forget about my last several hours, and watch the Tour on TV, but we had come this far and the course was less than half a mile from our Airbnb so after I while, I picked up my camera and hat and off we went. Finding the course was really easy – you just had to walk in the right direction until you got to it. We found a nice spot with shade on a downhill about 3-4 km from the finish line. Even so close to the finish, there were few people because it was a pretty serious uphill walk from downtown to get here. Here are some of the pictures I was able to take:

The riders left Monaco two minutes apart; each rider is proceeded by a motorcycle policeman and followed by a team car with a replacement bike on the roof rack. I estimate that they are coming down the hill in front of us at around 70 km/hr (42 MPH). They are flying! My goal for each rider is to keep the man in the frame of the photo for every picture I take as I track him from the corner above our location to the corner below it. Sometimes I came close, but it was a lot like photographing bobsled races!

When we got the idea of attending the Tour, we expected that having a time trial on the final stage would be decisive in determining who would win the Tour. But this is not what happened. By this stage, the race leader, Tadaj Pogacar, was already ahead by more than five minutes and only had to avoid crashing in this stage to win.

We did not want to stand there for about four hours given our level of travel fatigue, so we only watched the early riders who were very far behind in the race. Even so, we saw a number of different strategies. Some were riding to send back information on tricky turns to the race leaders, some were actually going for the stage win, and some were just tired after 3 weeks of racing and wanted the whole thing to be done with. We were sitting next to the guy with the white and blue hat and his wife. They traveled here from Holland, were wearing Team REV shirts and told us that they were supporters of the Dutch rider Remco Evenepoel, who was in 3^rd place. But they went absolutely nuts whenever a Dutch rider came by. I've not tried this before, but here is a video of one of the riders going by to give you an idea of how fast the slower guys were going:

The other thing that we noticed was that a lot of French people don’t like being told what to do. The main rule at the Tour was that you cannot cross the racecourse (boy, had I learned that lesson!). This applied to pedestrians as well because having a crash between a pedestrian and a guy on a bike going more than 40 MPH would probably not be a good thing. So, the gendarmes would stop people from crossing the street. It was amazing to us to see the number of people who would just walk slightly uphill from the policeman and then run across the street. After an hour or so, we’d had enough and walked back to the bakery to have dinner. It is a bakery and not a restaurant, but we are able to find focaccia and a salad. It is great to finally be doing what we had planned on this trip!