We've been looking forward to having visitors while in Paris, since Paris has many more interesting things to offer than Kansas does. Think Louvre, Notre Dame, Eiffel Tower, and Versailles versus corn, wheat, cows, and men in purple T-shirts. (Yeah, yeah, I shouldn't diss Kansas. I know. I like Kansas, but perhaps not as a tourist destination.)
My mom was scheduled to arrive in Paris this morning, and was a bit worried about whether or not she could handle the trip from the airport to our apartment by herself, particularly as it was the first time she had traveled internationally by herself. Of course, I agreed to take the train out to meet her. Yesterday, I called to let her know that it might actually be Blaise who met her, since Cherry was sick, and I didn't want to drag her out to the airport and Blaise was less than thrilled about dealing with a sick kid. So the plan was that if Cherry was sick, Blaise would meet my mom at the airport, and if she wasn't sick anymore, I would take her.
Then Blaise woke me up at 4:30 to ask if I could take his temperature. (No, I don't know why he couldn't take his own temperature. Maybe temperature taking requires ovaries?) So now he was sick, and of course Cherry still had a fever. The obvious solution would have been for me to just go alone, but he was even less equipped to deal with her than he normally would have been. So I loaded her in the Ergo, and set off for the RER station.
We bought tickets, and I arrived at the platform just in time to see the E line train that I wanted pull away. The next train wasn't for another 15 minutes, so I headed back to the A platform, since the A line trains run more frequently. The normally 15 minute ride to Chatelet took almost half an hour because we spent so much time standing still. Then we boarded the express train to the airport. Basically that means that although the train goes through all the stops between the center of Paris and the airport, it doesn't stop at any of them. Except that our train stopped at all of them. For a really long time. Enough time for throngs of people to get on and off. At least they could have if the driver hadn't made announcements asking us not to open the doors at each stop.
We finally arrived at the airport a good 40 minutes after I had planned to get there, and hurried off to meet Mom. I was concerned that we were late enough that she might have wandered off in search of us. Fortunately she was waiting just where we'd agreed to meet her, so that part at least went smoothly.
On the way home, we had to switch to a different B-line train halfway to Paris because they were having electrical problems along the line. (That's probably why the trip to the airport took so long too, but my French was not nearly good enough to understand garbled loudspeaker French.) We got back and were mobbed by Sapphire and Ezio, who had stayed home with Blaise.
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