The trip had an inauspicious start at the Hertz office on Avenue du Maine near Montparnasse. Despite the fact that I was able to rent a car from the very same location two months ago without having to show my passport, the very snotty assistant manager (if you hate people so much, why did you go into a service-oriented position?) informed me that it was obligitoire, meaning that I had to go home and retrieve it before I could take the car. Which turned out, in the end, to be a good thing, as it was also the case that my driver's license shows an expiration date of November 26, 2008, and even though I've renewed it, the new one hasn't found its way to me, meaning that even if I had had my passport, I couldn't have gotten the car, a fact which I remembered on my way back to get the passport. So Suzie had to come with me to rent the car and, unfortunately for her, had to drive the entire weekend, which, as will be seen, was not pleasant, particularly at the very end.
But once we got the car on Friday, we got stuck in only moderately bad Paris traffic, and the trip there was uneventful. Suzie's friend Stacey has a quite wonderful family -- a friendly, laid back husband from Finland and two adorable, fun kids. They live more or less in the country in a very comfortable, very quiet house, which was a real treat for us after the constant Paris noise.
On Saturday morning, after eating a delicious breakfast (cinnamon rolls, various types of delicious bread, jam, etc.) we took a walk around the nearby countryside. It was foggy and still, very peaceful and quiet. We didn't go the same direction as we had four years ago when we had our savage cow experience, and the cows we came across on our walk were a different breed (literally, the mean ones were all white) and were appropriately placid and bovine (although this one, Ms. 93 613, does seem to have a bit of an attitude):
Here are the boys, with proof that we were, in fact, in Flaxweiler:
After the walk, we started cooking, and when I say "we," I mostly mean Suzie and Stacey (and Stacey's husband), but I also chipped in. We prepared a feast. Last in were the turkeys, stuffed, of course. At about 4 p.m., we drove into Kirchberg to attend the annual "International Bazaar." Held in a huge exhibition hall, it consisted of about 50 stands representing about 50 countries, to raise money for charity. At each county's stand, you could buy food (and drink, lots of drink) and products made in (and typical of) that country. It was very cool seeing all the different nationalities and all the different foods and products. It also felt more comfortable to me because there were many more tall and light-skinned people there, and many English-speakers, which made me feel a little more in-place.
(I found a video on-line showing the bazaar. Unfortunately the narration is in French, but if you are interested you can find the video here.)
The American stand, in addition to selling "American" dishes like hot dogs, popcorn, and brownies, had a grocery store section, selling things that you can't generally find in European grocery stores, including, most prominently, Bisquick and Rice and Corn Cheks cereals.
After the bazaar and a trip to a nearby grocery store (which was enormous, and located in a very modern mall), it was time for dinner. Everything at the dinner was absolutely delicious -- the turkey was flavorful and moist, the stuffing tasty and not too heavy, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the cranberries, the creamed onions (I love those), the bread, the cranberries, and, to finish it off, two wonderful pies, pumpkin and apple. I ended the day stuffed, completely stuffed, drowsy, and very contented. It was everything you could want in a Thanksgiving, except that there was no football (something I thought about from time to time but can't really say I genuinely missed).
After a long night's sleep (which followed an even longer night's sleep on Friday night), we got up and started ... eating again. It was snowing lightly in the morning, and I sat looking out the window watching it come down, thinking how much the countryside and the snow reminded me of where I grew up. An odd feeling. But about 2 p.m. we had to leave to drive back to Paris. By this time the snow and rain had stopped, the sun was started to come out, and we anticipated an easy drive back.
Which we got for most of the trip, but the last part was a nightmare. Starting at about 20 miles out from Paris, the traffic on the autoroute became stop and go, and continued like that most of the rest of the way. By the time we hit the Périphérique, the expressway that circles Paris, we were inching along painfully, so we decided to get off and take the surface streets, which was in retrospect a mistake, since that was also a slow, painful crawl along Boulevards Masséna, Kellermann, and Jordan, and when we got to Avenue du Général Leclerc, the traffic lights were out, which slowed traffic even further, and we couldn't find a place to park, so we had to block traffic to get our bags out, and it was cold and rainy and Suzie had to circle the block again, but finally found a place. But we still had to gas up the car and take it back to Hertz, which required more driving through the clogged streets, and after we'd finally, finally checked the car back in (at 8:30 p.m., more than 6 hours after we'd left Luxembourg on our scheduled three-and-one-half-hour trip), we went to the bus stop only to discover that, apparently, the electrical disruption affecting the traffic lights was also affecting the buses, so that ours wouldn't be there for 35 minutes, which caused us to decide to take the Metro, necessitating, from where we were, the huge transfer from Line 13 to Line 4 at Montparnasse (the two moving sidewalks, one normal and one "plus vite," were both broken, as usual), so it was well after 9 by the time we finally got home, the question in our heads being, for the last two hours, why in the hell would anyone in Paris have a car?
But, notwithstanding that last little unpleasantness (which fell most heavily on Suzie, who had to drive), the trip was definitely worth it, a very pleasant, if too short, getaway from the hustle and bustle of Paris.
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