Reading: maps and guidebooks

Moving: none

20-21 September 2001: Travel

Nisou said goodbye to us before she left for work, and it was like we'd see each other in a week or so, which is how I like to leave things. We drove following SPG to the train station, returned the car and found our track, all with his help, and said goodbye to him. But Thursday just wasn't a good day:

• 9:00 GMT+1, TGV from LeMans to Paris
• 10:00, we waited in interminable taxi line for cab to Gare du Nord. The cab driver was une femme, probably a great insult to our first driver, a week before. A small dog rode in the front passenger seat. "Comment vous l'appellez, le chien?" I asked, and, like every other instance of my French I've given here, I am sure the grammar was completely off; yet, also like all my other efforts, I had made myself understood. "Boo-boo," she said, so of course she was just the best cab-driver ever.
• 10:30, I waited with luggage while RDC finagled us earlier Eurostar tickets, sparing us five hours of Paris au luggage. Our state of mind is evinced in the fact that we considered doing ourselves out of an afternoon in Paris as "sparing."
• 12:00, we rode Eurostar to London, reading not sleeping
• 2:00 GMT, after a three-hour train ride back, we arrove at Waterloo station and took on the black line--my map of London has vamoosed--the Tube goes by name instead of by color--to somewhere, and transferred to the Piccadilly line to Heathrow, a 90 minute tube ride for seven pounds instead of an hour cab ride for sixty bucks
• 3:30, we stumbled into Heathrow. Such a good idea to have left Paris as early as we could. Heathrow is unbelievably big and I think Magellan set out to circumnavigate it several years ago and hasn't been heard from since. Here, RDC finagled on purpose what had happened by accident on our way east: routing ourselves through Newark instead of into JFK and out of LaGuardia. United allowed that, and then we had to find our "airport" Sheraton. In the U.S., hotels have courtesy shuttles. In the U.K., you pay two quid a way. This was the last straw, and I fumed on the bus. A final straw was that the hotel, which was alleged to be ten minutes away, was more like 20. I managed to keep my trap shut, but I was, by my undisguised attitude and scowls, about the least pleasant traveling companion I had yet inflicted on my husband.
• 5:30, Heathrow Sheraton. A bed, a shower, and room service supper restored my spirits. Somewhat. We were asleep by 7:00.
• 5:00 am Friday. A wake-up call roused us in time for a 5:20 shuttle to Heathrow, to be there the minimum three hours before departure. We had been told we would be allowed one carry-on apiece so had packed our messenger bags as lightly as possible, to ease hand-searching that never happened.
• 9:00, we boarded after newspapers and breakfast rolls in the Red Carpet club.
• 3:00, I think, arrival in Newark, GMT-5. America, in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and Maine, had never looked so beautiful to me. In December 2000, after a direct Denver-to-Boston flight was canceled, a Dulles connection sent me over Manhattan on a beautiful clear day. Though I took a picture of Old Lyme from the air that day, I did not photograph New York. Nearly two weeks before this day, we landed and departed from a crystal-clear Newark day. Now, we strained our eyes for a glimpse of lower Manhattan. The weather was humid, the air smoky, and the skyline obscured, but it was not so obscured that we could not see how it was marred.
  • A vast, perhaps 40-foot, U.S. flag hung against a wall. It was beautiful and a welcome sight.
  • As we trotted up an escalator, a quite heavyset woman commented loudly to her equally plump companion, "An escalator is so you don't have to climb." (Rather as a hole is to dig?) I knew I was back and that not everything had changed: I bit back a retort: "Climbing is what keeps us from being as fat as you."
  • Waiting in the club, we called our families. RDC told his mother, "We're home." I told my sister, "We're in Newark."
• 7:00 GMT-7, in Denver, from the taxi on the road, RDC called his mother again, this time speaking to JTT, again, telling him, "We're home."
• 7:30, from within my own house intact and beloved and overgrown with tomatoes, I called my parents again, and this time, I said, "We're home." And I meant it.