Nana and the Children Disappear

You've heard about the cows, you've heard about the diabolical elevators, now here's another one....

The trip back from Freudenstadt was very long and tiring. We had hoped to stop en route at Nancy, but it was overcast and intermittently raining, and we weren't going as quickly as we had hoped (we weren't on the tollways, so it was slower going). By the time we arrived in Paris (the last 30 minutes being stop and go on the Peripherique and its approaches) we were beat.

There is a huge parking garage under our building, but when we left we (and I should really say "I") neglected to notice (a) which spot in the garage we were parked in, and (b) which door we exited from. When we got back to our building, I first pulled up to the gate, hit the remote ... and nothing happened. A second time ...nothing happened. Then I considered that maybe I should be over at the next set of gates. In the meantime, some old Mercedes leaking coolant had pulled over and blocked what I now assumed were the correct gates. After waiting for him to move, I pulled in to the second set of gates, pushed the button on the remote, and ... nothing happened. At that moment, another car pulled in immediately behind us, so that we were stuck. As that happened, the gate started to open. But we couldn't know whether we had opened it with our remote, or if the car behind us had opened it ... which meant that we couldn't be certain if we were in the correct garage.

With the other car behind us, we had no choice but to roll forward, so I headed into the garage, down the ramp, and took the first right. I'm now attempting to maneuver what now seems like a huge Chrysler Voyager minivan through a parking garage designed for small Renaults. And I don't know where our parking place is. We decide to pull into a space near the door to the elevator and have Suzie and I go up to the apartment to find the piece of paper that has the number of the space. At the elevator, we discover that there is water leaking through the closed doors. We push the button anyway, and when the doors finally open, we see that there is a torrent of water cascading down the elevator shaft, making a sheet through which we must pass to enter the elevator. At this point, we are wondering what effect the water must have on the electronics in the elevator, but we press "5" and head up. We find the paper with the parking space number -- it says "87" -- and we head back to the elevator. To get to the parking garage, you have to insert the house key and then push a special button. We do that, drop to garage level, race through the cascade of water, make a right through one door, and a left through two others, and enter the garage through the same door we had come through to go up ... only to find that the car has vanished: The space we had parked in was empty.

So now we've lost my mother and the kids. I'm exhausted, the elevator is flooding, I'm longing for my 2-car garage in Santa Rosa. I start off exploring the parking garage, which has more nooks and crannies than you'd think possible, hollering the Suzie and regular intervals to make sure that I don't get lost. Finally I figure out that the garage must have two levels. But how to get to the level the car is on is completely unclear. Through random wandering (with shouts to Suzie every 30 seconds) I find the ramp down to the second level, and eventually find my mom and the boys, all wondering where we had gone.

But to get to the correct level now requires that we move the behemoth Voyager again which, you may recall, was already damaged in Freudenstadt. This I manage to accomplish with great fear and skill, and when we get to the right level, we start looking for space 87 (we do this by walking, by the way). There's the three hundreds, there's the two hundreds, and there's space 187, but there is no space 87. Suzie even tries asking a French family returning from a weekend excursion, but they have no idea where space 87 is (they were probably just happy they could find their spot). In the end, we park in spot 187, cart our luggage through the deluge in the elevator, and return later to place a note on the windshield saying to call if we have usurped someone's spot.

This was the trip's low point. I was exhausted, felt incompetent about not being able to even park the damned car, and felt guilty about the damage to the car to boot. It was raining outside and raining inside. Being away for 4 days made our apartment seem strange again. And I was behind on my blogging. Bad bad bad.