"From Paris to Berlin and Every Disco I Get In" (well London actually). End of the journey.

We woke up in the morning to a big market. The town had been turned into a big street market, and it was a Tuesday!! Does this town ever work? You could find anything from fresh seafood, French wine, cooked chickens and Rip Curl backpacks. And people drinking beer at 10 o’clock in the morning!! Oh and Cam found a guy doing wine tasting, yes just after breakfast, so of course he had to try! He offered tasting of the local apple liqueur, which Cam just ´had´ to buy!

Amazing to find Rip Curl and Quiksilver original backpacks in such a small little town! The same town that has no internet or phone cards!

After strolling through the town and having our traditional French breakfast of espresso coffee and croissants, we ventured to the nearest ´big town´ to find ourselves an internet café and phone card to get in contact with home. Well the closest thing we could find to an internet café was a bookshop/stationery/craft store all in one! It was bazaar!

The computer was an apple iMac which was extremely slow and didn’t take our memory stick. We were hoping to finalise our resumes and send them to agencies. I swear it just wasn’t our day! In the end, we had to buy a phone card for France Telecom pay phone, and it cost us 1 cent a second to make a call to Brooke. Thank goodness Brooke came to our rescue and booked us some accommodation in London!

We searched this town for a business suit for Nat. The closest we found was a cool shop that had a great sale and Nat picked up a pair of pin stripe work pants for €8. Bargain!!

Last day

Today we sadly left France. Well eventually!! We were up early, 6.00, checked out of the hotel at 7.00. We allowed ourselves a good 4 hours to get back to Paris. We stopped at a small town for breakfast, but the local patisserie was closed at 9.30 in the morning. We had a quick espresso, ran in to the supermarket for a few essentials, Pringles, croissants and yoghurt. Time to head out back on the road. Now finding Charles De Gaulle airport proved to be a HUGE mission! Cam wasn’t too keen to drive through Paris again, so Nat tried desperately to find a different route. Well what the map said and the signs on the highways said (or didn’t say) were completely different! We would get off the highway and there would be no sign at all for the alternative highway to the airport. After two tries at finding an alternative route, we ended up taking the highway through Paris.

It was an incredible experience. The highway has other highways feeding off it every kilometre, and you have to make sure that you are in the correct lane with seconds to think about it! We followed the signs to Charles De Gaulle with many quick lane changes. The speed were traveling by the way is about 120kph.

So at 11.30 am we finally arrive at the airport, refill the petrol tank and realize that we haven’t written down which terminal our plane leaves from! There are four terminals! We return the car to terminal 2 with the hope that we have picked the correct one. Now remember that our plane leaves at 12.40 pm. We hand the keys for the car over and it’s about 11.50 at this stage. We rush in to terminal 2 to find that our plane in fact leaves from terminal 4. We have to get a shuttle bus to the other terminal which is a few kilometres away. We finally arrive after a 20 minute bus ride to our terminal, at the check in counter at 12.05 and our flight closes for boarding at 12.10!! Oh my gosh, Cam is dripping with sweat from running with the bags and me not far behind with the other cases!

We then pass through security and get pulled over. The security think that we have a knife in our beauty case. After 15 minutes of pulling our case apart, we find its Nat’s razor which doesn’t even have a blade on it! Are we cursed? We eventually make it the plane to find they are having delays refueling the plane. We sit on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting! Unbelievable! After all that rushing we get delayed on the tarmac!

We arrive in London to find it pouring with rain. We take the bus to the city and it takes us 2 hours!!! The flight from Paris took only an hour! After dragging our bags on to the tube in rush hour we finally make it to our hostel at 7pm. We quickly freshen up and meet Lynsey for dinner. Its awesome to finally catch up after a year and a half! Cam and Lyns have the local specialty, bangers and mash! We catch the end of the World Cup match between France & Portugal and the place goes crazy! There must be lots of French people in London too!