First thank you for signing up – we’re really flattered that so many people care to follow our expeditioning. We spent all day Tuesday moving and it was a much bigger task than we expected. We suffered.

By Wednesday, we were on a plane, presumably to Dublin for an all-day layover prior to our flight to Paris. After chilling out at Dulles for a couple of hours, however, we soon realized that our flight was delayed. I remember walking by the gate when we arrived in DC and noting “Good, they’re doing some maintenance. I like a well-maintained plane.” Well, that wasn’t maintenance.

Our Aer Lingus plane went mechanical on us, and since Paris was our end destination they threw us on an Air France flight straight to Charles de Gaulle. So we missed out on going to Dublin entirely. No VIP Guinness tour. No Porterhouse. No Trinity College. No Liffey. No craic. No nothing.

This gave us basically an extra day in Paris.We spent it in search of food, mostly.When we exited the subway, even our walk to the hotel was great.The street had a cheese shop, wine shop, coffeehouses, fishmonger, green grocer, bakery, chocolatier – how bloody civilized.

We went to the Marais, a Jewish quarter, for a falafel. No map, no address, just totally winging it. It was a bit of a wander. We gave us, hit the fromagerie for some banon and chevre, got a hunk of bread to mop up the gooey insides of the banon and headed for the park. From the park we got lost finding our way back to the subway and ended up at the falafel place!

Paris is a fairly horrid beer city.We hit one of the local brewpub chains, Frog & Princess, and it was a total debacle.The beer was hopeless.One of them was such a butterbomb we couldn’t get past the nose.The table was sticky and then they started blasting godawful techno mixes what sounded like a $20 ghetto blaster.We could not get out of their fast enough.

Despite the French, Paris is no more difficult to get around than Montreal.They’re well accustomed to people speaking broken French and everything is fairly well organized thus far.For dinner, we went off the beaten track to a Lao restaurant in an outer arrondisement.The food was brilliant – right out of SE Asia.Steamed fish in banana leaf, délice de bamboo, and ground pork with rice and egg.Yum!

Exhausted from hardly sleeping in three days, we crashed. Today, we go out sightseeing and with any luck Air France will deliver Sunshine’s backpack to the hotel…