Paris Arrival - Early Wednesday Morning, 24 Sept.

For the first time in several years my flight was actually able to pull up to a gate with a jetway at Charles de Gaulle (no parking the plane way out on the tarmac, slogging down the stairs, bumping along in a bus to the underbelly of the terminal, trying to find the way past grungy equipment and cleaning supplies to the passport check and baggage claim...). However, the gate was way out there! It felt like six blocks of corridors, then down an escalator and onto a train, then down some more corridors and a couple more escalators (how deep in the earth were we going?!?) and another corridor to the maze of red-strapped-crowd-control barriers (despite the fact that it was 7:15 a.m. and there was no crowd, we dutifully zig-zagged back and forth through the maze instead of walking a direct shot to the passport officers). Then it was down just one more escalator to the baggage claim with its plentiful free luggage trolleys, and the bags were already there (of course it HAD been quite a long walk). Then it was just an easy saunter past the customs agents to the Illy bar for my first café crème of the trip!

I always take a shared shuttle from the airport to the apartment I’m renting (very convenient door-to-door service, and the drivers are always nice and helpful). Sometimes there’s a short wait, but this time it arrived within a couple minutes; the bad news is that there had been an accident on the A1 expressway and the traffic was very slow. But hey, I’m in no hurry…I’m on vacation!

While we were moving very slowly in the traffic a cute little boxy car drove by (er, um, I guess a person in a cute little boxy car drove by) – the shuttle driver said it was a Fiat 500 from the ‘60’s, and that Fiat had just started reproducing them using the same design. I looked at the Fiat website, and the new ones don’t appear to be the same (e.g., much more of a sloping windshield rather than the boxy one from the ‘60’s), but I’ll have to keep my eyes open for one on the streets to see how they look in person.