Well, I don't know if it's true or not, but it's bound to have been mingled with the history of English invasions, given what went on over the centuries in that corner of the world.

StCirq -- I had printed up your "Not Trip Report" and read it the other day thinking you were finished. Once I read it, threw it away, and now I can't remember where I left off!! Really enjoying it and it's making me dream of returning to Europe sooner rather than later. :)

Wow, for a moment there I thought they dressed the donkeys to protect THEM from English marauders.

Like everyone else, I'm greatly enjoying your non-report. And agree, you should write a book.

t

Transported, once again, StCirq, by your writing gifts. I recall a fabulous few hours passed on the sand at Plage du Petit Nice near Arcachon, with a similar picnic and mindset.

I was going to start out this segment of the TR with the sentence " After an uneventful last evening in La Rochelle..." but then I remembered something and want to just say to all the traveling ladies on this board...Do not, ever, attempt to color your hair alone in a strange place while on crutches. I can't even begin to tell you the horrors that might ensue, but I do know of one, which is that those horrid little "pads" that are supposed to support you under the armpits can become "wheat blonde" in an instant. And that bathtubs do stain. And your shoulders, and even ankles, can get "colored," too. Live and learn, and be thankful you are traveling with an SO who thinks you're cool even if you're trying not to appear in Paris tomorrow with totally gray/white hair looking way older than you actually are. I vant to hit Paris in chic mode! Who doesn't?

We get to the Europcar office, having negotiated an extra day's rental for the car, at about 9 am for our 11:00 train to Paris. The Europcar office is right across the street, and runningtab leaves me outside the train station while he goes to sign off the final papers. I'm standing there on crutches, my newly wheat blonde hair flipping in the breeze, and here comes a bloke about my age, scruffily clad and bearded, and he starts to engage with me. Nice enough, garrulous, he's got a pretty lab-mix dog with him, and he launches into a tale of how he just arrived last night from Spain for a big party, spent the night at the party and with friends, and before the party he put a bag with a really special bottle of liquor he'd brought from Spain on the hood of his rental car so he could get the dog settled in the car...and before he knew it, right before his eyes...la bouteille was stolen! Then he tells me that lots of people actually want to steal his dog as well, that folks approach him and ask if they can have it. OK. I tell him there are malins everywhere, and La Rochelle is no exception. He says yes, it's true, and I am wondering if he is some sort of malin himself, but not worried. I generally don't feel threatened by much of anything at all in Europe, and especially in France. But this guy is a tad weird.

Then he asks what nationality I am, because, as he says, I am blonde and blue-eyed and not very French-looking, even though we are speaking French. And he can't figure out how I am speaking French with him without, maybe, BEING French.I tell him, and he seems very surprised, as so many people often are. He says he thought I was German or Dutch - because of my Big Blue Eyes. I tell him that there are loads of people in the world with big blue eyes, and just then here comes SO to "rescue" me from this conversation. And, as expected, the guy toddles off and we can go to the quai and wait for our train.

We have lots of time - an hour or more, so runningtab goes and fetches us a couple of espressos, and we sit in the sun and wait. Most of you probably know about the screens they have at train stations in France where they show the layout of the train and where, exactly, your car will arrive so that you can walk to the appropriate spot. Well, we were there too early for the information to be posted, and when we asked were told by a station attendant that it wasn't " affich'e" yet. This was a brilliant moment for me, as for days, for whatever reason, I'd been trying to remember the word for poster in French - affiche. And, of course, affich'e meant it wasn't "posted" yet. So many moments like that I had.

We are on car 18 of a 30-car train to Paris. This means walking a really long way down the tracks just to get on our car. SO makes an effort to go back to the station to get sandwiches for the trip, but the line is too long, so he comes back. Before boarding the train we take a few minutes to read the plaque at the end of the train station waiting area tha memorilizes the deaths of SNCF workers during WWII.

The ride is fast and smooth. We stop in Surg`eres and Niort and Poitiers...maybe more, I forget, I was sleepy. But we're in Paris in less than three hours, and now it becomes a real challenge, and a very interesting housing equation.

Paris, coming into the enormous Montparnasse station...it's huge, and we are arriving at a place far, far from the taxi stands. We stay on the train until everyone else has left and then get off...still have a load of territory to cover before we get to a taxi stand, and it's treacherous, with grooves in the sidewalks and uneven cement, and, well, finally we're here and there's a special line for handicapped people...cool We get priority for a cab!

So we get a cab and venture out into Paris traffic. We're headed for the 20th arrondissement, so we have to traverse pretty much the entire city. And it's mobbed. Why? It's a Wednesday in September. Why the zillions of bicyles? Why the bumper-to-bumper traffic around Place St-Michel at 4 pm?

At any rate, the cab driver's estimate of 25 minutes to get there, as I'd asked him, was about accurate, and about 60 euros, was about accurate, if extortionate. I don't fault him - it took forever, but here we were in front of the apartment building we were going to be staying in for three days, and it looked...nice, and interesting, and had a lift. And I had the code from Johanna, and we got in. It gets much more interesting from here on...

Ah, the plot thickens again! :-)

Had to see what a quichenotte looks like:
https://www.google.com/search?q=quic...w=1611&bih=905

This site says their called “kiss me not”.
http://pegs-blog.stbarth.com/tag/quichenotte/

StCirq, maybe you should have worn a quichenotte to ward off the advances of the guy who had his special liquor stolen.

We have a special word for those who are about to attach themselves to one of us, drunks, druggies, etc "ahoy"

Don't stop now!

You reminded me that Hub and I stayed at Le Meridien Montparnasse to be near that station for a trip to Chartres. We had an extraordinary meal at Montparnasse 25 at the hotel. I'm going to do a mini TR of it separately.

More soon, please!!

StCirq, you were brave to try coloring your hair given the crutches but I'd have done the same thing as I can't stand too much gray showing either.

OK, so we're risk takers, I guess, and certainly go-with-the-flow types and despite both of us having had many a night in splendor in a fine hotel somewhere in the world, this trip was about spending as little as possible without couchsurfing.

So, I checked out Airbnb, knowing full well that some people have had really bad experiences with it. I looked at well over 200 apartments and rooms in Paris. I was driven. We had three criteria: 1) it had to be in an outlying arrondissement that we weren't too familiar with, 2) it had to have a balcony (OK, if we're going to be skinflints, we need at least one bit of luxury, and 3) it had to be under $100 a night.

Finally found one that met all the criteria, but must have been a little brain fried the night I booked it, because it wasn't our first choice to end up with a room in someone's house/apartment, but rather to have a place of our own....but I booked a room, not an apartment. I think it was on the train to Paris from La Rochelle that runningtab asked "Is this an apartment or a room?" and I had to actually check. Oooops! Room. Well, we'll deal.

Johanna, the owner, has given me the code to the building and the code to the interior door, and they both work, so once we survive the cab ride there, we're in. Johanna is there and is gracious and greets us and shows us around. Her mother lived not far from where my house is in the P'erigord, so we have some common ground to discuss. It's a peculiar place, quite large for a Paris apartment, with a big kitchen and big salon, and a long, long hallway with three bedrooms on the left and three bathrooms on the right - VERY confusing! One with a bath tub and a bidet, one with a toilet and a sink, and one with a shower and a sink. Then there's another independent shower room at the end of the hall.

Can we put stuff in the fridge? Yes. Is all that stuff set out on the counters in the morning that looks like breakfast stuff for us too? No. When can we use the bathrooms? Whenever we're not using them. When is that? Whenever we're not in them. Seems a bit random.

The first bedroom as you head down the hallway is Johanna's brother's room - who knew there was another inhabitant? Sometimes it's occupied by him; sometimes it's not. Sometimes he has a dog there. Sometimes he has a girlfriend. Sometimes he has a dog AND a girlfriend. Sometimes we cross paths; most often we don't.

The next bedroom is Johanna's. The door is always closed. She never seems to leave except to go into the kitchen or the living room (and she closes the door when she does that).

The third door is the door to our room, which is perfectly comfortable, with a double bed and dressers and a desk, and a balcony...but the balcony is so amazingly small only one of us can actually sit on it on a chair, and the other has to sit in the doorframe to it in another chair. No big deal...we can manage.

BUT the promised WIFI does not work. And Johanna and the brother and the brother's girlfriend don't seem to have jobs - they're at home all day long. And in the evening they settle into the living room and close the door and we don't know if we can bother them or not. And suddenly there's a cat...and I'm allergic to cats and not fond of them...and it's outside our door all the time. And we keep getting confused about which of the four "bathrooms" we're using. If we need to pee, we end up in the shower room; if we need a shower, we're in the room with the bidet and sink. The whole corridor that this place is laid out around is like a fun house at a carnival, with strange rooms behind closed doors everywhere you look. And it's dark. They have these little tiny lights everywhere that don't give off much more light than candles.

It might be the most peculiar place we've ever stayed, but it doesn't dampen our enthusiasm for being in Paris, except we HAVE to get wifi, as I have a job coming in to work on before we leave, and I must get my email. Johanna has tried, unsuccessfuly, to connect us to various servers, but it's just not happening, so out we go to find a solution. Found, at the cafe La Factorie, a 4-block limp from our new abode. It's to be our new hang-out for the next three days, as I'm not in any shape to get far around Paris. And at the end of the day, we are a bit weirded out by our accommodations, but have no problem with spending our few days in Paris in a very limited space, watching life go by and having a Leffe or two and pondering how our hosts actually make a living, other than renting out our little room with the miniature balcony.

((L))n this...

Great description.

Such a mind picture you have produced!

Saint-Martin de Re----<< like walking straight into an artists imagination >>

From your description alone, I simply must go there.

Your writing is so beautiful and interesting, much better than any guidebook.

Oh My! You are handling this "room" much better then I would (note to self.. make sure to select 'apartments' not rooms :) )

St Martin de Re is where they make the beer.