CoCo's Corner

I have been off for the last seventeen days. I've enjoyed Mother's Day. I've gone to France. I've rested, relaxed and did very little. Now, tomorrow, it's back to the grind of waking up at 4:45 in the morning and go back to work. For some reason, I'm just not looking forward to it at all. I have so enjoyed my time off. I loved having time in France, just Ted and me, it really was a great bonding time for the two of us. I guess when I was choosing my path in life, before I was even born, I should have chosen to be born wealthy instead of so dang good lookin!! WAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Last Thursday was my granddaughter, Lydia's birthday. She turned two. I was kind of reminiscent that day, because last year we got to spend her first birthday with her. I was a bit sad to realize that she had turned two and I didn't get to be with her this time. I hope she had the very best of days and has another great year learning and exploring. I really do love that little munchkin!!

I have a little jet lag - but, I did sleep until 5:00, so that is pretty good!! OK - so yesterday was HARD!!! I guess I didn't realize how hard it was until the 4:30 wake up call came in and Ted and I logged into the computer to check our flights. I checked Facebook and KayeLynn and Rodger were online. I was telling myself "those two geeks should be in bed". Then I realized that it was only 8:30 at home - we were getting home at almost 7:00 THE NEXT NIGHT!!! That meant almost 24 hours in airports and airplanes. To top things off, every flight was full to the max, which made it very uncomfortable. Our very last flight, from Atlanta to Salt Lake experienced so much turbulence that the captain kept making the flight attendants sit down. I was sooo dehydrated and miserable. All I wanted was a drink of water - I didn't get one until Denver!! Anyway - enough complaining - because there was absolutely nothing to complain about when you get to go to France - and you ...

Again, we slept in today. It's been kind of nice to stay up late and sleep in. We really didn't know where anything was, so we went on an adventure looking for breakfast. We found a little cafe called Paul (yep, odd name). Ted got a sandwich and I got a gauffre. The one thing about Bordeaux, people don't speak English here like they do in Paris. So, I have to butcher the language a bit to find a way to communicate. I started asking for strawberry, then apricot, then just went for sucre (sugar). We sat at the little cafe and ate. We then decided to walk. We walked a ways and found a citadel. It was beautiful. It had these large identical statues on either side with four or five sea horses, being driven by two women and a mustached man. They were running down three people, one had a mask. We are sure the people being run down had some type of significance, since one had a mask that he was holding. At the top, some forty feet up, a woman in a long flowing gown i...

So, today was our train journey. We travelled from Paris to Bordeaux by train. They had us set up to fly to Bordeaux, but, we wanted to go by train. It's a three hour journey and I was sooo excited about it. We slept in this morning, we didn't need to check out until noon. We got up, got ready, and still had some time. So we took a little walk through the neighborhood and found the ATM. We walked through quite a bit of it. It was such a sweet little Parisien neighborhood. After we checked out, we trundled our little behinds to the metro station. Both of us have huge bags and carry on type bags. The metro station by our hotel had stairs. It was quite amusing to see us get all of our baggage to the metro station and through the turnstiles. But, being the people we are, we did it!! We got to the Montparnasse station where we needed to get our high speed train to take us to southern France. We bought some sandwiches and desserts and sat down and ate while waiting for ...

We slept in quite late this morning, we didn't get up until almost 10:00. That is crazy in our books, but it sure felt good!! It was a pretty glorious day. It's been rainy and kind of cold until today. We got up and moving and headed for Trocadero Gardens. There were thousands of people there. We are so glad we went to the Eiffel Tower yesterday, the wait today probably would have been five hours. We got some brunch (?) there. I had a gauffre with apricot jelly and Ted had a cruet, a ham and cheese sandwich. From there, we headed to the subway. We looked very American trying to figure out how to buy tickets, we ended up figuring it out. We took our first journey to the Arc de Triumph. We kind of wandered around it - never really getting up to it. There were hundreds of people there, too. Today was an AMAZING day!!! We then got back on the subway and headed to the Louvre. Our subway station was right outside of it. We could only see the outside wall. We walked throu...

Last night, Ted and I were pretty wiped out by the time evening came. We ended up at the hotel around 5:00 and did nothing else. We ordered room service, a couple of chicken sandwiches with "vegetable chipes". They are like potato chips, but not nearly as good. Kind of sweet. I don't know what kind of vegetables they use. I passed out around 8:00 and was gone. We both woke up around 1:00 in the morning (Ted said that at home, it was 5:00 p.m., so we were officially gone on vacation 24 hours at that point). I couldn't go back to sleep and was up for two or three hours. The only problem with insomina in France, I have nowhere to go!!! I can't get up and play on my computer or go watch TV - because Ted is sleeping in the same and only room. I finally went back to sleep and then didn't want to get up this morning. Ted finally forced me to get up and going by 9:00. I got a gauffre for breakfast from a street vendor. It's just a waffle and I had the...

Yes, I know we left yesterday, but this has felt like just one long day. So I'm calling it day 1.5 Our journey started with our ten hour plane trip. I thought, for sure, that with it being an international flight, we would have the coolest of planes. The kind with the television screens in the back of the seat in front of you and you could watch any movies you wanted. It wasn't. It was an older plane, the seat in front of me was rather worn and cruddy, the seam was coming out of the back. Anyway, it was rather unconfortable. I was freezing the first few hours. I pulled out my "Paris for Dummies" book and started reading. Still not knowing for sure how we were going to get to the hotel from the airport. The movie "Leap Year" was playing (they played three movies, the other two were "Crazy Heart" and then "Bride Wars". I didn't pay much attention to the movie, I kind of was mostly reading my book. I sure gained an appreciati...

Yep, it's the day. We are leaving today!! I was very blase about this trip until 1:30 yesterday morning. I woke up in a panic, knowing I wasn't even closely prepared for this journey. But, ready or not, here we come Frenchie!!! There is so very much I want to do and I know I'm only going to be able to do a fraction of it. This is an opportunity of a lifetime that I get to share with Theodore. I'm scared, I'm nervous, I'm thrilled, I'm excited, I'm exhausted, I'm terrified, I'm ecstatic, I'm happy, I'm irritable, I'm everything!!! Ten and a half hours from 5:00 tonight, I'm going to be in Paris!!