Skip to main content

Last stop Paris

It’s now Tuesday, May 7th and we are headed on the train to Paris from Madrid (via Barcelona.) Last hotel on my itinerary as I cancelled our trip to the Lake District. It was just too much traveling, time to head to Sheila’s and stay put until it’s time to go to Southampton and our boat trip home. It’s been a great holiday but I am already ready to go home. That’s not to say that I am not glad that we will be seeing Sheila and England. Of course I am. It’s just that thoughts of home and Mitzi, walking and being quiet, have been coming into my mind more often. 

I think I posted about Segovia. At least I wrote something up on my iPhone (currently typing on my iPad) that I hope was saved. Today it’s just been a very long day of traveling. We packed last night which was quite the job. We haven’t bought a lot of heavy stuff, just some clothes and a couple of Spanish tiles, t-shirts for the kiddos. But it still meant rearranging things. Glad we did it last night though. It took over an hour and this morning we got up at 6:00 and by 7:00 were out of the hotel and on our way by taxi to the train station. 

Ah taxis. Taking a lot more than I’d budgeted for. Think I’ve written about that. It is just too hard to haul the suitcases around and definitely not on any subways. So there will be a taxi tonight and a taxi Thursday morning to Gare du Nord for the Eurostar and then a taxi at St. Pancras to transfer to Paddington. And maybe (probably) a taxi from Southampton train station to the boat a week Thursday. 

Still, the overarching thought for me today is how thankful that we have traveled in safety and good health so far. That we haven’t lost anything. I had a moment of high anxiety when we got to Madrid Atocha train station this morning and I couldn’t remember where I had put my green card. I worried I had left it on the bed as I was packing last night. Looked frantically through my bags and finally located it in a small pocket. Have put it with my Canadian passport now; I hadn’t kept it with my passport because I always worry it will fall out. But I do think it is the best place for it. 

But traveling healthy and safely have meant we could go from place to place, see the things we wanted to see. To say nothing of what it would have cost if we had got sick or lost something—or even lost each other. I wonder if this is a function of getting older. I never thought this much about my health when I was young, even ten years ago I really didn’t think a lot about health. Always took out insurance of course but my illness last November and episode in March shook me and I notice that R just doesn’t have the energy anymore, he is less sure of himself than he used to be, and there is the necessity on both our parts to have access to WCs (toilettes, aseos) every few hours. The joys of getting older. Thus we travel while we can although our next trip will be way less ambitious than this one was! No multiple transfers and no hauling loads of luggage!!

Well, I suppose I should visit the train’s WC again before we get to Paris. Why is it that these trains always run out of loo paper? Do people use that much? More prosaic musings :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

January 2024 and blogging

  I haven't posted on my blog for a long time. Partly that was due to not knowing what to write about and partly it was wondering if I wanted to put myself "out there" anymore. And in what way. I subscribe to a few blogs on Substack, which is a subscription-based blog. You can pay to have your own blog, you can pay for someone else's blog, and that means you get to write and post and get comments back from a whole lot of people. You can comment on other people's blogs--if you pay--or else you can just read the blog and not pay. Of course you might miss some of the "pay only" content--much like modern news media has teaser stuff but to read the whole article, you have to pay for a subscription. The Substack blogs cover all kinds of topics and there are a few "professional" writers--meaning they're journalists and writers who have published and been paid larger bucks than the $5 a month they get per subscription on Substack--but I think most ...
12 comments
Read more

It’s just another day

  Yesterday was the final day of my 8-day assignment in a 4th grade class; I’ve written something about that assignment in a previous post, “Revolt of the Guinea Pig,” It’s been a challenging 8 days which, as Dickens might have said, brought out the best in me and probably the worst in me as well. But yesterday morning I had that experience that every teacher dreads—shelter in place, also known as possible shooter situation. I had arrived at the school at 7:20 thinking how wonderful it was that our heat had broken a bit. The skies were overcast, we’d had rain the day before, there was a cool breeze. As I walked to my classroom (photos below of what the buildings look like), I waved to the students already gathered on the other side of the gate, who were waiting to rush in, some to the cafeteria for their breakfast, some to the playground to run and hopefully get some of that energy out before the bell rang at 7:55. I unlocked the outside door to our building, walked down the corrid...
2 comments
Read more

Journeying to Helsinki

Sheila and I got up quite early in our hotel room, were packed and ready to go by 7:30. Had some buffet breakfast (a couple of mini croissants, double Gloucester cheese, fruit and a latte), brushed teeth, out of room by 8:30 am. At train station before 9, picked up my tickets and realized I wasn’t going directly to Heathrow on the train but was going to King’s Cross first and then would have to transfer to the Tube. Ugh. Still the first class carriage York to King’s Cross was very nice. I was served a ham sandwich and a brownie. (If I had realized that would be the last food I’d get until 3:00 pm, I would have eaten the whole sandwich. This is becoming a theme with me, long waits between meals.) As first class also means free WiFi, I began to dismantle my arrangements for Edinburgh although I couldn’t fix the Ryanair part of it yet—what a surprise. I have over a week to do that, if I’m not too tired when I get to the hotel in Helsinki tonight, I will get that done. It was difficult to ...
2 comments
Read more