After our whirlwind weekend in Pittsburgh, then one busy day working it was on the road again – well, really in the skies again. We flew to Paris yesterday (was it really only yesterday?) and hit the ground running (in a sleepy completely jet-lagged sort of way), trying to stay awake as long as possible to try and get acclimated. So how’s that going? Not well. It’s 6:56pm and my eyes are drooping and every other word is a typo. But … I … will … stay ..awake … until … 8pm … as God is my witness otherwise I’ll be up at 3am ready to par-taaaay!

We are in Paris to make good on a long-ago promise that Chuck made to his niece Katie (word to aunts and uncles: nieces and nephews have extremely accurate and extremely long memories about promises) that he would take her to Paris for a week after she turned 21. She’s 23 now, so he was a little slow making good on the promise, but here we are! We also are doing something new – we rented a two bedroom apartment near the Louvre from HomeAway.com rather than stay at a hotel. Two rooms in a hotel would run us at least 500 Euros a night (if we stayed at a flea bag), whereas the two-bedroom apartment one block from the Louvre is costing us around 300 Euros a night. The great unknown: will the apartment live up to the online pics? It looked great, and the building had an elevator most of the way – we’d have a short flight of stairs to our apartment on the, as it turns out, eighth or ninth floor. More on that later.

Katie flew into Paris from Detroit, and we flew in from LAX. We figured it would be easy enough to coordinate but we failed to take into account the sheer size of Charles de Gaulle airport (oops). Happily we all had iPhones so after a few missed opportunities and several phone calls (“So what do you see around you? Do you see a sign that says Exit?”) we finally connected outside of passport control. Chuck decided that it would be a good learning experience for Katie to take the metro (versus, you know, a taxi or a reserved limo) so that’s what we did. it only took about 2 1/2 exhausting hours to get into Paris – and then we had to find the apartment. Then we had to find the management folks as they were shorthanded and couldn’t meet us at the apartment. So it goes. We did eventually find the apartment and the management company and got our keys. Yay! But I really should have read this detail in the description of the apartment: “The elevator has issues and cannot be guaranteed as working all the time.” Okay, no big deal! We run marathons, we can climb stairs, right? But can we climb narrow winding stairs in near total darkness without tumbling to our deaths (I exaggerate slightly. We thought it was total darkness until a resident of the building hustled by us and flipped the light switch on)?

The apartment is pretty nice. There really are two bedrooms and baths (both, as they say, en suite), and there is a bit of a view of the Louvre. The location is close to some small markets, several brasseries and even a pharmacy, and it’s one block from the Metro. We walked around a bit (enough to start to really understand the phrase “dead on your feet”) and finally headed back to the apartment with some neighborhood take-out and all of our plans to stay awake until 10pm shattered. It’s now 7;35pm and I believe I am the last person awake.

Tomorrow we take on Disneyland Paris!!! Pics of the trip are here (did I mention Katie smokes?!? Ewwwwwww. but she says she’s quitting “after this trip.” We shall see.)