Day 1-The long long flight~

So-to get to Paris, France from Texas, you have to fly at least 9.5hrs!!  This was the one thing about my trip that I dreaded the most.  Flying does not bother me at all, I actually enjoy it, but up to now, the longest flight I'd been on was to Boston!

Fortunately I was traveling with seasoned international travelers.  Karen and her mom-who also happen to be the funnest travel partners-where very helpful in the overseas process.  Can't wait to travel with them again!  We had a blast. 

Another fortunate thing was that our plane on the way over was not full-unlike the flight back.  Even though we were in the middle row of seats, Karen and I were able to have an empty one between us for comfort.  One of our movie choices was "Midnight in Paris" with Luke Wilson and Rachel McAdams.  Was a great movie-especially since we were on our way to Paris!  We did have some crying kids-and one set followed us home-but overall the flight over was not too bad-of course I was too excited to sleep-maybe an hour tops-but I figured I'd sleep when my trip was over!  Oh, and there was the fact that my new neck pillow went missing-more on that later-LOL

We left Houston at 3:00pm Monday Sept 26th and arrived in Paris 8:15am Tuesday Sept 27th.  We so looked forward to the "cooler" weather we hoped for in Paris, but when we deboarded the plane, we were hit with hot muggy weather-really?? I thought we left that behind!

The airport in Paris was interesting.  As I mentioned above, my new neck pillow went missing.  Once we finally figured out where our luggage was, we made our way-sweating all the way!  Once there, I noticed this lady standing next to me with a neck pillow-same color, same tags cut at an angle as I cut mine-did this just in case we had a mix up-anyway, when I saw her I asked "Did you happen to find that on the plane?  I lost mine and that looks a lot like the one I lost"-of course I did not want it back-who knows if she was clean-but anyway she looked at me real guilty and says "No, eet is mine" ( my attempt at a french accent-lol)  So Karen and I look at each other and start to laugh-I've been in Paris all of 15 mins and was already pickpocketed-LOL  Like I said-did not want it back, but you can tell she knew it was not hers, and who picks up a neck pillow found on the floor and uses it???  As we came to find out, Pariseans are not all to concerned with hygine!

The next great adventure was getting a ride to our hotel!  Although I had suggested pre-book of a hotel shuttle, we decided that we could find cheaper transport from the airport-because after all-Paris is a big town-shouldn't be that hard-LOL  The joke was on us.  Apparently the way to go is to pre-book through your hotel-we now know for next time!  We were approached by one guy who promised us a ride for 20 euros each-ok-but we had to walk under and over a lot of crazy places to get to his van.......since he had his hand on my luggage for a quite sometime, it was a little hard to walk away.  We finally said thanks but no thanks and headed back inside.  We then found another driver-in a nice suit and all, offer the same deal just to have driver number 1 track us down and try to tell the new driver that he was taking us....long story short, we went with driver number 2.  We felt good that he told us to buckle our seat belts-I figured a crazed murderer wouldn't care about our safety ;-)  After an hour with crazy French rap music, a little country music and some wild driving, we arrived safely at our hotel Grand Hotel Leveque!