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Travel & Cathedral de Notre Dame Exterior
Our cab to Tampa International
Airport arrived on time @ 1400. Cost was $10 for both of us. The
lines at the counter were very short. We were on the plane by
1530. Our flight took off at 1545. Our flight to Miami was only
38 minutes. I went out for a last chance smoke. It took 15
minutes to get back through security. Even so, I still had 45
minutes before boarding started.
We got a personal pizza at Pizza
Hut for $3.89 and $2.29 for a 20 oz. Coke. Our only other choice
was Sara Lee muffins & rolls. So far, so good. We were surprised
that there were no currency exchange in either airports. We will
have to wait until we get to Paris to exchange our dollars for
euros. I was surprised when after about an hour after our
departure from Miami, I noticed some land out the airplane
window. It was the Bahamas Islands.
There were no individual video
screens on the seatbacks as there were on the Virgin Atlantic
flight to London last year. Our flight has a scheduled 1900
departure time and it was met. We arrived at Charles de Gaulle
airport at 0933 Friday morning.
We called parisshuttle.com for
our ride from our ride from the airport to the hotel while we
were waiting for our luggage. We finally made it outside around
1030. We got to the Agora Saint Germain at around 1100. Our room
would not be ready until 1400.
We headed down to Notre Dame
which was only a few blocks away. We walked around the outside
and took quite a few pictures including a picture of a large
statue of St. Charlemagne. We ate a Sandwich Mixte €5.20) which
was little more then hard bread, some kind of meat (I later
found out it was farmhouse ham) and cheese. It was tasty.
We immediately had power issues.
I expected the power converter to step down the power from 220
to 110. It did not. I popped my multiple outlet strip a couple
of times, knocking out power to the entire room. We had to go to
the front desk to get the breaker reset. Luckily, the battery
chargers for the camera and laptop batteries are dual mode
(220/110) so it should not be that bad.
I will not be able to synch the
iPaq and laptop because of the Outlook issues. I suspect the
problem may be with the folders I have on the network. I
expected Outlook to complain, but still open. It does not. I was
having the same kinds of problems in Richmond.
Paris is the shortest city by far
that I have ever visited. By this I mean that the buildings are
very low. Most are in the 6-8 story range. I saw the reason on a
show about the history of Paris. First, there were restrictions
placed on building heights in the 1800s. The city planners
wanted a consistent look and feel to the city.
Additionally, they originally
excavated the limestone for the buildings from underground in
the city itself and they excavated further for the catacombs.
The ground underneath is like Swiss cheese, making in unsuitable
for supporting larger skyscrapers.
We ate dinner at Cafe Bibi. I had
Ghourmet Sabzib (rice, herbs, veil). It was €11.50 while the .25
liter Heineken was €3.00). We looked at our plans for tomorrow
and called it a night around 2130. We watched (strange) TV for a
while and went to sleep. |
