In which we go to the Parc Floral

(As a note, in case you're wondering what we did Friday and Sunday, I took the kids to the swimming pool, but there are limits to how many times one can write about the swimming pool unless something rather unusual occurs. Cherry jumping off the side of the pool and Sapphire and Ezio having splashing wars don't exactly count. Also, although we had some fierce winds on Sunday morning, so far as I can tell the Paris area was spared any real damage from the storm that came through Europe.)

Saturday was a beautiful day--mostly sunny and in the mid 50s, a perfect day to go to the park. We'd been wanting to go to the Parc Floral for a long time (ever since our aborted attempt back in the fall), but things never seemed to line up properly, so when Blaise suggested that we go there on Saturday afternoon, I thought that it sounded like a great idea. First though, we needed to do some housework, since our apartment was a disaster. Each of the kids put in 45 minutes of work, and I put in an hour, and the house was, if not gleaming, at least respectable. (It's amazing to me both how quickly an apartment this size turns into a disaster area when all 3 kids are home all day, and how quickly it can be straightened out. It takes our house in Manhattan a week to reach that level of disaster, and a full day to clean up if it does.) I went to the grocery store (unaccompanied by any children, who were busy playing Harry Potter) and we ate lunch. By about 2:00 we were ready to head for the park.

At this point it's important to realize a couple of things. The first is that (in case you hadn't figured it out) we don't have a car, and so depend on public transportation to get anywhere. The second is that neither of the train options for accessing the park is particularly convenient. Basically there are 2 choices: (1) Ride the RER one stop to Vincennes, and walk 15- 20 minutes to the entrance to the park (plus another 15 back to the playground) or (2) Take the RER into Paris, switch to the metro line, and then take that out to Chateau de Vincennes, which shaves 10 minutes or so off the walk, but easily adds 20 minutes to the train ride. In light of this, Blaise suggested that we might try taking the bus, which would take us straight to the Chateau de Vincennes metro stop without the inconvenience of going into Paris and switching trains.

We headed for the bus (first checking the time table of course, so that we wouldn't have to stand outside for forever) with tickets in hand, only to discover when we got there that we couldn't use RER tickets to ride the bus. (We had assumed that since we needed zone 2-3 tickets to ride the train to Vincennes, we would also need them to ride a bus to Vincennes. I discovered yesterday that all busses take standard t+ tickets, which are what you use to ride the Metro and busses inside the city of Paris.) Since our tickets wouldn't work, we headed to the RER station in the hopes of figuring out via the ticket machines which tickets we needed to ride the bus. No such luck. We were stuck figuring out whether or not it was worth it to deal with the hassle of the Vincennes RER stop (I hadn't brought tickets that were valid all the way into Paris, so that was out), and whether there would be enough time for the kids to play on the playground before the park closed.

After a great deal of hemming and hawing we decided that it was, and caught the next train toward Paris. We reached the playground around 3:35 (so it took us 40 minutes from the time we caught the train, and only 4 minutes of that was train time) and the kids headed straight for the giant octupus slide. Once they had climbed that and gone down all of the slides on it, they headed for a double helix slide (which Sapphire correctly identified as such) with Blaise and I following close behind. Cherry got up to the top and panicked because the slides were dark inside and because there were kids pushing and shoving to get on, so Sapphire walked back down the steps with her, and then up again to go down herself.

Then all 3 kids headed over to a giant wooden play structure with lots of mesh nets to cross and slides to slide down and ladders to climb up, and Blaise and I, fortunately, found a bench nearby where we could sit and watch them climb. At one point Cherry almost fell off a ladder that was too big for her to climb down (she'd been going up it without difficulty) and a dad who was standing nearby got ready to catch her. She freaked out, and I boosted her down (I told you the bench was nearby). Soon after we headed over to another large structure; this one aimed at kids more Cherry's age, but after we had been there for a few minutes the park people came riding by on their bicycles, blowing whistles and telling us that the park was closing and that we had to leave. So we packed up our kids and headed for the entrance, along with everybody else, and with complaining commentary by Cherry each time we passed somebody who didn't seem to be headed for the exit.