Paris 2024 - Day 9 (July 25th) - Men's Rugby Sevens

Even though the Olympics don’t officially kick off until tomorrow, the Games have become so large that some events have to start early. Today, we have afternoon tickets at the Stade de France for Rugby Sevens. Stade de France is due North from us almost to the northern part of the ring road circling Paris. Beth brought croissants and raisin snails, bananas and orange juice for breakfast the night before. Sean, looking like death warmed over, goes straight for the coffee maker.

Paris 2024 has an app that is supposed to tell us the shorted route to any location in Paris. The app is telling us that we should take Metro Line 13 directly to the Stade de France and that it will take just over an hour to get there. This is good news because the Gaité Metro station is only another 100ft beyond the pizzeria. We are not sure whether we believe the app so we leave a little before noon and hope that we will find somewhere to eat before we get to the stadium. Unlike most Olympics where your tickets let you ride mass transit for free, the French actually increased the cost for the metro and for a Navigo card which lets you ride for free anywhere in the five zones covered by the Metro and RER systems. We had purchased our cards in the US, and they are good for 14 days at a cost of about 10 euros per day. They are simple to use, just tap your card at the entrance and in you go.

Unfortunately, when we arrive at the Saint Denis station, the first security checkpoint is just beyond the Metro entrance and there does not appear to be any eateries nearby. The subway got us here about 90 minutes before the start of the match, so we are way early, and no one is going through security. After about 20 minutes, the line begins to move, but when we arrive, one of the gendarmes tells us that our section is on the other side of the stadium and that we should go through the security line there. This stadium seats over 80,000 people so it is a long walk to the other side of the stadium. The security line is pretty long and while we wait, a man in front of us turns around and asks us in English where we are from. When we tell him Cupertino, California, he starts laughing and says that he used to work in France for Oracle and had been to their headquarters in Redwood City many times. He asks me about the pins I’m wearing on my vest and I explain that this is our 14^th Olympic Games. He says that he is a little worried about whether Paris will be able to provide a great Olympics as it has been very difficult to get around in the leadup to the Games. I hand him one of the 100 or so pins in my giveaway pocket (my goal is to come home with fewer pins than I came with) and he tells us that he hopes we will have a great time in Paris.

It is always interesting to see how security will deal with a guy wearing pins all over his jacket, pins on his head and a good-sized camera lens in his backpack. I’m pleasantly surprised to see that these officers just want to look in my backpack to see if I’m carrying any bombs (I’m not!). They are not yet letting people into the seating area, but we find a satellite version of the Olympic superstore and Sean and I head off to check it out. I don’t see any pins at all, but I do find a nice Olympic metal thermos bottle to replace the one that I trashed in Arles and Sean finds a bucket hat that he likes. We pay (okay, I pay!) and head back outside to find Beth who has been trying to find some shade.

They are still not ready to let people in and now there are huge lines at each gate:

We expect that not everything goes perfectly at the beginning of the Olympics, so this doesn’t faze us. Eventually, the line starts to move. When we get to the front, we find two stops: one to check tickets and the second an additional security check. Paris 2024 is the first Olympics where all of the tickets are electronic (although they are happy to sell you collectable paper replicas) so everyone gets out their phones to have their barcodes scanned. The security check is pretty cursory. They look at my camera, but they mostly wanted to see whether it was really water in my newly purchased thermos. Beth and Sean go looking for lunch while I find our seats. And what seats we have:

              

We are in the fifth row directly on the try line! If all of our A level seats are this good, I’m going to be very happy! Beth and Sean return shortly and report there while the food stands are open, they don’t actually have any food yet.

While we wait, the pregame entertainment starts. The most interesting to me was a short video where they took pictures from the 1924 Olympics in Paris, animated them as if they were singing songs by AC/DC, The Buggles and from the movie Grease (among others). After that, the announcer indicates that they have a guy dressed up like Pierre du Coubertin (founder of the Olympic movement) who will be walking around the arena and that if people see him, they should take a selfie with him and post to social media. Next, they play a trumpet fanfare and teach the crowd that whenever they hear that, they should yet "Allez" (French for Go!). Finally, is a ceremony called les trois coups (literally, the three knocks). The arena host indicates that this is an invention of the French theatre during the reign of Louis XIV. The theatre manager would bang the ground 12 times to indicate that the audience, and particularly the King, were in their seats. This was answered by 3 sharp blows to the ground using a big stick called the brigadier, the first would indicate that the guy running the fly system (the pulleys and counterweights for changing scenery or raising and lowering the curtain) was ready, the second would come from below the stage and the third would come from the opposite side of the stage. When all three blows were sounded, the performance could start. For Paris 2024, they will have former athlete (often French) of the sport for that session conduct les trois coups with the brigadier. Anything that exposes sports enthusiasts to the local culture is a good thing!

Finally, they bring out the teams of Samoa and Kenya, who will be playing the first match. For the uninitiated, Rugby Sevens is a version of Rugby that was developed in Hong Kong in the 1970’s and that has 7 players to a side instead of the usual 15, but on the same size field. Since everyone is running basically all the time, each half takes only 7 minutes instead of the usual 40 minutes. As a result, this is the first of six matches we will see this afternoon. Here are a couple of the Samoan players:

As you can see, most of the players are pretty middle linebacker shaped people. Beth and I have been watching Rugby Sevens on TV for some time so we expected that Samoa would beat Kenya easily and this turned out to be the case as Samoa won 26-0. By this point, Sean is hungry enough to miss some of the game and goes in search of food. He comes back with baguettes with jambon and fromage (sounds so much better than ham and cheese sandwiches!). The second game between Argentina and Australia should be much better as both of these teams are among the leaders in the Rugby Sevens league. We are a little surprised that Australia pulls away to win 22-14 because Argentina was ranked higher coming into this match. In match three, the US is playing Uruguay. Uruguay has just been promoted once and relegated twice in the last three years so the US should win this one. Uruguay keeps it close for the first half but gets worn down in the second half and lose 33-14. The next match is the one that most people in the stands wants to see: France versus Fiji. A lot of people are wearing jerseys with the name of the new French star Antoine Dupont on them. But Antoine only plays limited minutes in the second half and that is not enough, as Fiji prevails 19-12. We’d hoped that all the French fans would leave at this point making it easier for us to depart later, but that did not happen, although the crowd was much quieter after that game. The next to last game featured Japan and South Africa. South Africa had been in the Rugby Sevens league since the inaugural season 1999 while Japan had been relegated in 2015 and had not made its way back since, so we weren’t expecting a close game. And we didn’t get one. South Africa won 49-5 in a game that was so exciting, I took no pictures!  But the final match of the day was much more interesting: Ireland versus the All Blacks from New Zealand. Ireland was ranked number 2 in the world this year while New Zealand was right behind them at number 3 and both teams won their first Olympic matches yesterday. Ireland led 12-0 at halftime, but New Zealand scored in 2^nd half extra time to win 14-12. Here are some pictures from today’s event:

As we started to leave, we were told by the volunteers that the Metro line 13 station we arrived at was closed. That meant a walk with 80,000 of our closest friends to the RER B station. When we finally got to the station, Sean mentioned that it might be faster to walk about a mile and a half to the Metro 12 station. Hmm, walk in the open or be a sardine in 90 F temperatures? We opt to walk through the station, out the other side and head to the nearest Metro 12 station. As we expected, most people did not want a longer walk so we got on the first subway train, and it was not crowded. Win for Team Robie!

Paris must be far to the west of the Central Europe time zone because the sun is still up at 7 PM. Maybe as a result, Parisians tend to eat late – many of the restaurants don’t open for dinner until 7 PM and many are not busy until around 8 PM. We decide to go to a Chinese restaurant around the corner from our Airbnb. All of us are listening carefully to the wait staff to see whether they speak Mandarin. Sean hears enough so when the owner’s wife comes over to place our order, Sean surprises her by ordering in Mandarin. The two of them have a long conversation which includes how it is that Sean can speak Mandarin. Then she tells us that Sean’s Mandarin is much better than her English! Dinner is delicious, but not very spicy. We almost always buy Mongolian Beef as one of our dishes because this is one dish that should be spicy. The fact that it was not spicy may say something about what the Parisians think about spice. We’ll see if the trend continues. Steps for the day: 10,839.

Paris 2024 - Day 8 (July 24th) Arles to Paris

We have tickets on the TGV bullet train to Paris around noon. But to catch that train, we first have a 2-hour drive to Marseille and need to drop off our car at the Gare de Marseille train station. The ride is uneventful although the traffic is pretty heavy. The highway ends practically at the train station. This would have been great if we had been able to figure out where the rental car drop-off was. Unfortunately, we didn’t. We went into the parking garage but ended up in the parking part of the garage, so we went back out. When we went back out, we were forced off in a direction away from the train station. And because of the one-way streets, we had a really difficult time getting back in the right direction. Driving down the crowded one-way streets, I was getting serious PTSD from my drive around Nice and Monaco. When we went into the parking garage, we had an hour before our train was due to depart. When we finally got back to the train station and found our way to the rental car return, we had 15 minutes. It took 10 of those minutes to get to the train station and find the right platform. Our seats were close to the front of the train so by the time we got to the right car, found places for our bags and got to our seats, soaking in sweat, we had 2 minutes. After that, the trip was really pleasant. The TGV is supposed to reach a top speed of 200 mph just like the Shinkansen in Japan although it seemed like we were going faster in Japan. 

Right on time, our train pulls into the Gare de Lyon. If you think of Paris as a clock face with the Louvre at the center, the Gare de Lyon is at the 4-o’clock location just to the north of the river Seine. Our Airbnb is in an area called Montparnasse and is at the 6 o’clock location about halfway between the Seine and the ring highway that circles Paris. While we probably could have taken the Metro, as the Paris subway system is known, we were at this point clueless about the subway and opted to go stand in the very long line for taxis. For a while, the line moved pretty quickly, but then it came to a complete stop. No taxis were arriving. After a while, the people who managed the taxi line walked along the line and said that since the roads were completely clogged up due to the Olympics (probably the torch relay), no taxis were able to get to our location. They told us that we should go back into the train station, go downstairs and exit at the Bercy Arena where we will see Team Handball in a few days. The taxi stand on that side of the building was still open. Okay, off we go. We find that “still open” was a little optimistic. There are plenty of taxis, but they are having a lot of trouble getting out of the taxi stand. We keep walking until we find an available taxi and then wait for about 15 minutes before we are on our way. The 15-minute trip takes about 30 minutes due to the road closures, but we finally arrive at the Airbnb. Unlike the other two Airbnbs, there is no handoff here. We have a code to open a lockbox that is located on a bicycle rack on a traffic island across from the Airbnb. Beth opens the lockbox and gets our keys. However, we aren’t quite sure how to get in. Fortunately, there is a security guard, who looks like he might be from somewhere in West Africa. He looks at our keys and says that he will show us where to go. He shows us a place under the intercom at the door that we tap with the key to unlock a door to the courtyard between two 10 story apartment buildings. Here is a view from the courtyard:

“Our” apartment is on the 7^th floor of the building on the right. (In US terms, that is the 8th floor, as what we call the 1st floor is "0" in France.) He takes us up in a very small elevator. Other than the emergency staircase, there are only two doors on our floor. He unlocks the door and lets us in. We give him a "merci beaucoup" and he smiles as he leaves.

The apartment is sort of T-shaped. Directly in front of the front door is a small kitchen (refrigerator, dishwasher, sink) and then a dining table. To the right is the living room and at the far end of the top of the T is the bedroom with a curtain to separate it from the living room. To the left of the front door is a toilet. To the left of that is the bathtub/shower and washing machine and another sink. Beyond the bathtub/shower is an area with a sofa bed which is where Sean will sleep. There is not a lot of privacy, but we will do our best. We think that the owner of this space might be an architect because of the many books on design, art and architecture around the apartment.

During our travels, we’ve been monitoring Sean’s flight since he is supposed to arrive at Charles De Gaul airport northeast of Paris in the early evening. We get a text message telling us that he’d landed and was taking RER B (Réseau Express Régional) from the airport. The RER is a kind of light rail/train/subway hybrid, but this one looks a lot like the Metro subway trains. It takes him about 45 minutes on the train and a 15-minute walk to get to the Airbnb. He texts when he is 5 minutes out and Beth goes down to let him in. Sean announces that he is wasted and is going to have sleep for dinner. Beth and I go down to a pizzaria that is about 50 ft from our front door. I try some of my poor French, but the waiter speaks English, so I don’t have to work too hard. I have a salad (which is literally a bowl of lettuce) and we split a vegetarian pizza. And since we are in France, we each have a glass of wine.

Paris 2024 - Day 7 (July 23rd) Arles, Avignon and Chateauneuf-du-Pape

Today, we are visiting the Roman ruins in Arles (pronounced ARL) in the morning, then taking a tour of the Chateauneuf-du-Papes wine growing region. Our tour guide is going to pick us up in Avignon, so we have train tickets at around noon from Arles to Avignon. But first Arles. Beth tells me that just like the ceramic tiles around the doors in Porto, Portugal, shutters are a thing in Arles. Apparently, they have to have a particular look but can be of almost any color:

People have been living in Arles for a long time because it is on the Rhône River that connects the Mediterranean with Switzerland. Its history dates back to about 800 BCE and was a Phoenician trading port before it was conquered by the Romans in 123 BCE. Given its location on the Rhone and on the main route between Rome and Spain, Arles quickly expanded into a major city. The main building from that time is the Amphitheater built in 90 CE. You can think of it as a mini-Coliseum – no naval battles inside, but they did have chariot races and gladiator fights:

After the Romans were defeated, the amphitheater served as a small walled town although it is not clear to me how many houses they could build even though they disassembled a lot of the interior walls to build them. The tower in the left picture above is one of four watch towers that were built at that time. Since it became a national monument in the early 19^th century and particularly after it received UNESCO World Heritage status in 1981, the city has been working on restoring it to its original look. Outside the amphitheater, we see this sign:

Many famous artists have lived in Arles including Picasso, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Van Gogh must have had a better agent because we see a number of these signs facing views that were in one of the more than 300 paintings that Van Gogh painted during his two-year stay in Arles before he was confined in a mental asylum.

Across the street from the amphitheater are the ruins of the Roman theater:

The Theater was built in the 1^st century CE and originally could hold 8,000 people, but it was used as a marble quarry in the Middle Ages so there is only the stage, the orchestra, two columns and a small bit of the seating area remain.

Down the street from the Theater is the Church of St. Trophime, a former cathedral built between the 12^th and 15^th centuries. This church was built upon the site of the Basilica of Arles that was built in the 5^th century and dedicated to my namesake St. Stephen. Here are some pictures:

St. Steve in the middle picture!

It is a little past 11 AM and we have about an hour before our train departs for Avignon. Unfortunately, everyone in France eats lunch late so most of the sidewalk cafés don’t open for lunch until noon. We finally stop at a crepery in the square across from the church.

We head back to the parking garage to pick up our car. We are getting a little tight on time, but know that the train station (Gare d’Arles) is not far away back toward our Airbnb. Waze takes us to the right area, but all of the parking places, at least those that we can park this boat in, are full. We finally end up parking up on a sidewalk behind a row of other cars. But we still don’t know where the Gare is. We walk all the way around the big building close to us and before realizing that it is an apartment building. At the last minute, we see a small building across the street with a small sign that says Gare d’Arles. We are pretty sure that we’ve missed our train but are relieved to find that the train is 5 minutes late!

Avignon is the 2^nd stop so the train ride is not very long. The area around the Avignon train station is closed to traffic so Beth is communicating with our guide about where we will meet him. There is a central area that goes between the train station and the cathedral that we are told to follow, then we head off to the left a little. Down the street, we see a guy getting out of his car and waving at us – I guess we are in the right place!

Our guide is Olivier. Olivier was born in England, has a French mother, and moved to Provence (the region we are in) about 20 years ago. He wants to know what we know about wine, and we are able to convince him that we have some knowledge about the subject?! We are going to Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a wine that we have enjoyed since we were in our 20s. I had originally thought that the name meant the castle of the ninth Pope. This is because in the 14^th century, there was a schism in the Catholic church and for a while, all of the Popes ruled from Avignon. In fact, toward the end of this time, there were two Popes at a time, one in Rome and one in Avignon. But Olivier tells us that the accurate translation is New Castle of the Pope. This was actually a summer home built in the late 14^th century for Pope John XXII, the second of the Avignon Popes. He tells us that we are going to visit two wineries, the first a small, family-run business and the second, a more modern business. We are used to winery tours in Napa and Sonoma counties where the wine maker is elevated to a God-like figure who is able to blend wines from various vineyards and varietals to produce outstanding wines. Olivier explains that the approach is much different in Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Here the terroir is everything. Terroir is a function of microclimate (the distribution of temperature and precipitation and wind throughout the year), soil type (fertility, drainage and ability to retain heat) and geomorphology (how the mountains, valleys, rivers, etc. interact with the client). Basically, the French believe that if you match the right type of grape with the right type of terroir, then anyone can make a great wine.

Both wineries we visited are in the Chateauneuf-du-Pape AOC (Appellation d'origine contrôlée). This is an organization that sets rules to ensure that the reputation of the wines in the region stay high. The AOC controls all wine produced over a 3200-hectare region that includes the village of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and parts of three other villages. It is allowed within this zone to blend 13 different red grapes into the wine, but the majority of each blend must be from the grenache grape. About 95% of the wine produced in the AOC is red wine and the other 5% is white wine. Rose wine cannot be produced in the AOC. While we are used to long rows of grapes growing along a trellis in order to facilitate mechanized grape picking, the AOC has mandated that grapes must grow vertically and must be picked by hand. Vineyards can violate the rules if they want to, but then they cannot use the Chateauneuf-du-Pape name on their labels which means that they won’t be able to sell wine at premium prices. Here are some pictures:

Note how rocky the ground is in the second picture? Olivier explains that the best wines are grown in the most terrible ground! If the soil is rocky, the grape roots are forced to grow straight down in a search for water. Once the roots reach the underlying water table, they will be less sensitive to the ups and downs of precipitation than plants that grow much shallower root systems in rich soil. In fact, we see almost no soil at all in the field that we walk into – all we see are rocks! Olivier is obviously well known in these wineries. In fact, at the 2^nd winery, the woman running the tasting room (the daughter of the owner) is busy with another group, so Olivier helps himself to a bottle in the refrigerator and pours our glasses for us. We prefer the wine at the 2^nd winery and ask Olivier how we can buy some. He says that you don’t want to buy now because the wine will cook in the heat just as our bottle did the day before. He said that instead we should buy our wine now through a service that he uses, and he will ship it to us in November when it is cooler. We agree and buy a half a case of several different types of red wine. On the way back to Avignon, we catch a glimpse of the New Castle:

I learn later that the Germans had used the castle as an observation point and when they retreated from the area, they tried to blow it up. However, they were only able to destroy the north portion of the tower, the south portion remains to this day. Olivier drops us off in Avignon close to where he picked us up and suggests that since we have some time before our train, we take a walk by the Pope’s church. It is above 90 F at this point, but it sounds like a good idea so off we go. After about 10 minutes, we see this:

This is the Palais des Papes, the home of six Popes from 1334 CE to 1377 CE and a couple of anti-Popes for about 40 years afterwards. It remains the largest Gothic palace in Europe. We wish we could go inside, but we don’t have time before our train. But we do have time for gelato! An enterprising vendor set up a stand under the trees across from the Palais and they were doing great business on this hot afternoon, and we are happy to get in the queue and then enjoy the gelato on our walk back to the train station. There is a little problem with the train because we don’t see a train going to Arles. It turned out that we had to go one stop south, change trains and then go one more stop to Arles. While waiting for the second train, we listen to the “song” of the cicadas which, just like in the eastern US, have hatched out and are making a ruckus. Back in Arles, our car is still there and doesn’t have a parking ticket on it! We were pretty cooked after a day in the heat (and wind) so we just had the same charcuterie plates we had the previous night and then pack our suitcases.

Paris 2024 - Day 6 (July 22nd) Nice to Arles

Today we left the Airbnb in Nice. On arising, we checked Beth’s baggage air-tag and find that the bag is no longer in Newark. In addition, we’ve got a message from Swiss Airlines (who is responsible for our missing bag) saying that our bags will show up at the Nice airport around 10 AM. It would be great to finally wear something different!

Our Airbnb hosts had told us that it was okay to park where we parked on Sunday, but that we would need to move the car early on Monday or it would get ticketed. So I walked over to the car and drove it past the harbor, into Nice (now without barricades!) and parked in the bakery parking lot. To make sure that we qualified as customers, we ate breakfast there. I had something that translates as a "raisin snail". This is a pastry that is wrapped around and around in circles with raisins and spices in between sort of like a snail shell. I also ordered orange juice which meant that I got to watch their automatic orange squeezing machine. You throw a bunch of oranges in at the top, then the oranges move down into the machine and are squeezed one at a time by a series of balls. The juice comes out at the bottom. We've spent enough time that we need to give the keys back to the owners and head to the airport.

The trip to the airport only takes about 20 minutes! We park close to the correct terminal and head inside. I’d been wondering how we could get into baggage claim without going through security or if we would have to go through security without a boarding pass. It turned out that there was a keypad and speaker at the exit to baggage claim that indicates which extension you should push to reclaim a bag. Beth pushes the button and inputs the claim number, and a woman tells us to enter when the door opens. We enter a short hallway with security doors on each end. Presumably, someone is looking at us on closed circuit TV to see if we are safe.  Then a woman comes and opens the door at the other end of the hallway. She tells us to go look for our bags and then come back to her. It only takes minutes to find our long-lost bags:

Success! I'm really looking forward to wearing some clean clothes! We head back to the car and off we go. We had been hoping to visit with my former bosses Elisabeth and Heinz at their seaside home in Saint Aygulf about 75km southwest of Nice. Even after everything became fouled up, we were hoping that we would be able to visit with them on our way to Arles, but going to visit them now would mean that we would not be able to visit the ancient Pont du Gard UNESCO World Heritage site in Avignon. So on to Avignon we go. It is about a 2.5 hour drive, but the roadside geology makes it a very interesting trip. Here are some pictures:

This is part of the Massif Central – a blob of rock that is about 3 Billion years old! The bottom picture is of Mont Ventoux, a 1910-meter (6270-foot) piece of limestone that sticks straight out of the surrounding flat ground. Ventoux means windy in French, which is fitting because the wind blows at 70 kph (56 MPH) for 240 days a year! Tour de France enthusiasts will know that this is a frequent climb during the Tour and that the top looks a lot like a moonscape with almost no vegetation.

Along the way, we pass under a couple of overpasses designed for animals. You’d think that these would be for apex predators like big cats or bears, but you’d be wrong. There are pictures of the animals that the overpasses are for, and the largest one is …the hedgehog!

On our way to the Pont du Gard, we pass the Pont D’Avignon. As we go by, the lyrics of a song I learned in elementary school are running through my head: "Sur le Pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse, sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse tous en rond" (On the bridge of Avignon, they dance, they dance, on the bridge of Avignon, they all dance in a circle).

One of the highlights of any of our travels is a visit to a UNESCO World Heritage site. This is the reason for our interest in visiting the Pont du Gard. The Pont du Gard was a Roman aqueduct/bridge over the river Gardon built in the 1^st century AD to bring water to the city of Nemausus (now known as Nimes). In part, it is known for the huge arches in the bottom layer of the bridge. Here is a picture:

Nemausus was like a rest stop on a Roman highway connecting Rome with Spain, so it was important for the guest houses and public baths to have plenty of water for the locals and for important persons traveling to and from Rome. The aqueduct remained in use perhaps until the 6^th century and much longer as a toll bridge. The bridge suffered serious damage in the 17^th century when some of the huge limestone blocks were raided to build other buildings in the area. But over time, the bridge became a tourist attraction and serious efforts to renovate it were made in the 18^th through 20^th centuries. There are parks on both sides of the river where people can rent rafts, kayaks or just hang out. Here is a view from the bridge:

There is also a very good visitor’s center and museum. It was a little dark for pictures, but here is a view of a typical guest house in Nimes:

Most interesting for me were the tools that helped the Roman’s build the bridge and their amazing water management. They had water-heated floors, temperature mixing valves and some very clever ways of filtering sediment out of the water supply so the pipes didn’t clog up. Of course, their water pipes were all made out of lead which caused major health problems for anyone who lived long enough, but the fact that they had such sophisticated water systems two thousand years ago was incredible.

On the ride back to our Airbnb in the village of Arles, we get a much better view of the Pont D’Avignon – there is only half a bridge there! I don’t know when the other half fell into the river, but I did learn that the dance that the song was based on was held under and not on the bridge. Google maps tells us we are close to our Airbnb, so we stop to get some breakfast and dinner stuff. In the process, we learn that even though they are called "supermarches", they are not the same as American supermarkets. We pull into a parking lot that has a bakery on one side, a veggie/fruit market in the middle and a meat/cheese shop on the other side – three different shops with three different checkout counters in order to get what we need.

We had a difficult time finding the Airbnb because it was located on the main route into downtown Arles at the end of a narrow alleyway and had a locked gate with a keypad. We went past that alleyway two or three times with U-turns each time before we got to the right place. Once inside the gate, our host, who lives in the other part of the house, comes to greet us. She speaks almost no English but is a wizard with an app similar to Google Translate. She speaks into her phone in French and the translation comes out in English. We have a nice conversation. She explains where everything is and what we need to know. We sit down and enjoy a light dinner of ham, bread and cheese and fresh vegetables. We planned to finally drink the wine we got from our hosts in Nice, but when we try it, it is clear that it has been cooked in the hot car.

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!