CPUnk I write right. Right? Aye.

…and in conclusion, let me say…

So, we’re leav­ing Madrid tomor­row in the morn­ing — the trip has run its course.

Once we got here, I was so tired that I ust dropped off the face of the blo­gos­phere — so sorry about that.

The time here was rel­a­tively quiet, we pretty much just recu­per­atd from all the adven­tures, stayed in the hotel a bit and left things casual.

Angie’s friend Lulu, and her mom, Kristi, came to join us in Madrid, which was a lot of fun. Angie and Lulu were pretty close last year, but then Kristi moved back to Spain to be closer to Lulu’s father and their other child. Being here, they were able to catch up with us and have a good time — it was fun.

We tried to check out the bull­fight­ing museum, but it was a non-starter — closed early by the time we got there (that seems to be a Span­ish thing to do — close at Siesta time — and then, close early any­way and never re-open.

We all went to the Palace, which is still an active palace, even though the oyal fam­ily lives some­where else. It was pretty awe­some to see all the fancy rooms (like the giant din­ing room from some­thing out of a period movie of Lords and Ladies all dressed up at a table for 100. But the best part for me and Nate was the Armory — with all the amaz­ing armor and weapons from as far back as the 7th cen­tury (!) … alas, no pic­tures allowed — so we just have to tell you that it was awe­some. Armor suits and horse armor and all sorts of amaz­ing stuff.

Here are a few pho­tos that you might enjoy:

Angie, Nate, and Lulu have it out in the Madrid Hotel

Kathy and Angie in Paris at one of Kathy’s favorite places

Angie — somewhere

Angie and Lulu and Donald

The clos­est we came to a bull­fight (meh)

Lulu!                                                                                        Lulu and Kristi

Oh, I guess nobody told Kathy that we couldn’t take pic­tures at the armory

Ummm…?


Peo­ple going absolutely NUTS when Spain won against Germany!


Count us all in!


As we drove from Barcelona to Madrid, the were just every­where — it’s about 40 feet high (it’s a billboard)


This is the Gaudi Church in Barcelona — it’s quite beau­ti­ful — pre­tend the crane and ad for eclipse aren’t there

I think we’d say we had a good time … thanks for watch­ing the blog with us.

God Bless, all — see you soon.

Barcelona Rocks

Ok — some­one told me that Barcelona was like Tacoma — they were so nuts, it’s not even funny.

Barcelona is not only beau­ti­ful, it’s fun — and yes, while we’re stay­ing in a swanked out super hotel — I think we’d be hav­ing a pretty good time any­way, since the city is so nice. We’ll have to come back some other time and really enjoy it for what it is — a great city. Come here now!

Tomor­row, we travel to Madrid, where we stay for the remain­der of our trip and then fly home. I’m still dread­ing the flight because we don’t have upgrades on our seats or any­thing — but who knows, maybe some­thing good will hap­pen anyway.

I got a good work­out in today, which made me pretty happy — it was tough to get to the gym in most of the other places — but here in the heart of civ­i­liza­tion they actu­ally have health clubs with weights and every­thing (the last place had some sort of phys­i­cal ther­apy chairs that didn’t have any resis­tance — it was sad and weird.

We went to the Picasso museum, which made me feel like a huge slacker — but maybe it’ll get me off my duff and start writ­ing again… or ever

Once we get to Madrid and I get a few days rest, I’ll do a big photo-spread in the blog so you can see every­thing. This is a small post because it’s late, and I want to get up tomor­row and go to the gym and then (woohoo) drive for 6 hours to Madrid.

Life is good again. Had a lit­tle trou­ble find­ing a decent din­ner, but came back to the hotel and had a grandiose room ser­vice com­plete with ridicu­lous things like caviar and foie gras — yes — that’s insane, I know — but well … it was a fun recovery.

Happy Fourth of July from out here in the rest of the world!

A pox on Sardinia and all they stand for

So, after a day of dejec­tion and dis­ap­point­ment — Kathy spent the morn­ing reor­ga­niz­ing our trip to get us back on track. Since Sar­din­ian for “spa” is “crapolini” … we decided it’d be nice to stay at a nice place when we get out of here. This morn­ing, Kathy called the orga­ni­za­tion that did the great hotel in Flo­rence (I think it’s called some­thing like “Great­est Hotels in the World ™” (I kid you not)), and sched­uled for our stay in Barcelona to be only a few days, then we spend a longer time in Madrid, which we hear is pretty cool as cities go.

So, suf­fice to say — we were pretty excited about that, she and I — and the day started out well. We had a lit­tle pep in our step and decided to just “punt” on Sar­dinia, not try to do too much, and get outta here in one piece.

After our deli­ciously cold break­fast (com­plete with oily cheese slices!), we decided we’d go to another beach and see if we couldn’t find a way to get a lit­tle snor­kel­ing in, since Nate was pretty avid about that (being that he was just cer­ti­fied in the Bain­bridge Island pool, and wants to be able to tell his bud­dies sto­ries about his great swim­ming escapades). So we asked the peo­ple behind the desk about a place to snorkel … and they gave us the name of some dive shop nearby that seemed to look pretty good in the brochure (and did end up being good overall…).

We headed off to the dive shop, saw that it was near a beach, and thought we’d have some fun going to the beach after get­ting the snorkel setup going.

When we got there, we soon learned that this was pri­mar­ily a scuba dive shop (which we knew), but they had a pri­vate area we could snorkel in that was filled with inter­est­ing stuff (pre­sum­ably). They gave us wet suits (mine was a full body scuba suit because they had noth­ing else), and before we knew it — we were heft­ing about 30 pounds of gear down to the water for a “quick snorkel.”

In short order, this became a trial — Angie didn’t like the taste of her snorkel, the wet suits were too hot, the water was actu­ally up against a cliff with a plat­form — no beach — and it was all get­ting a lit­tle hairball.

After a lit­tle grap­pling, I was in the water, help­ing the kids into the water, and Kathy was strug­gling to fig­ure out how to fit her glasses on under her mask because she’s basi­cally blind with­out them. She even­tu­ally opted to leave the glasses on the plat­form and just make do anyway.

So there I am, stand­ing in water up to my neck in a wet­suit with all the snorkel gear and fins, Angie is float­ing around face down nearby in a wet­suit shorty, fuss­ing with her mask and snorkel, Nate is cling­ing to my side, the lad­der and back and forth (valiantly, I might add, con­sid­er­ing his trep­i­da­tion about swim­ming in open water), and Kathy’s func­tion­ally blind. Rock on! Let’s swim!

We headed out around a sail­boat that was anchored nearby, with Nate swim­ming tan­dem with me while I dragged the dive buoy (did I men­tion that I had a weighted buoy with me, a require­ment of the dive shop?), Angie’s splash­ing ahead with mom, and we’re get­ting along some­what ok, all things con­sid­ered. I think at some point, Kathy took the buoy and we set it up as we got around the far side of the sail­boat (which was a 30 footer, I believe).

Now we’re in 20 ft of water, try­ing to “get the joy” going on the snorkel stuff (our orig­i­nal vision was like walk­ing off a beach with a tube in our mouths to look at lit­tle crabs, not this) … we swim over to a cliff face, and I’m teach­ing Nate to float face down with his tube up and just dan­gle from the rock. He’s a bit freaked out, but get­ting into it a bit — when Angie and Kathy just start hair­balling over Angie’s mask. She’s fuss­ing and flip­ping out, and com­plain­ing that it tastes bad and that water was get­ting into her mask and fuss, fuss, fuss. So brave Nate wraps his arms around a rock and says, “I’m ok Dad, you can go ahead.” I’m proud of him for that. I swam over to Angie and Kathy, who were grap­pling with her mask.

Given that I’ve done a bunch of scuba, etc. — I was also act­ing as the portable dive plat­form — any time some­one needed a break in open water, they’d hang on me and I’d just float and kick, keep­ing us all afloat (ver­ti­cal, not like an actual plat­form, thanks).

So, I come over, wrap my arm around Angie and am start­ing to help her adjust her mask (again), when she starts shriek­ing that some­thing bit her and then just starts shriek­ing that it hurts, it hurts.

I imme­di­ately swim us back about five feet and check the water, only to see that there’s a jel­ly­fish about the size of a foot­ball right where we were. She’s been stung.

It’s float­ing towards Kathy, so I tell her to come out towards me and swim around it (she’s blind, mind you) — which she does just fine. Angie is now apoplec­tic with pain and shriek­ing (justifiably).

At this point, Nate is rapidly devolv­ing into brain­stem sur­vival mode — filled with com­plete and absolute dread. He’s in deep water, which he hates, hang­ing on a rock, not sure what is in the water, and well … he’s flip­ping out. Mean­while, I’ve got an arm­ful of shriek­ing Angie, and a func­tion­ally blind wife. We paid cash for this expe­ri­ence, mind you.

So Kathy gets over to Nate pretty quick, and he’s yelling that he doesn’t want to die, and she’s telling him he’s not going to die, and I see that the thing is float­ing towards them — so he’s even more freaked out … and I tell her that I’m get­ting Angie out of there, and she does like­wise with Nate.

So the two of us swim on our backs and rescue-swim the kids back around the sail­boat, back to the plat­form — me, I’m going about a mil­lion miles an hour, Kathy’s only doing about half a mil­lion — I think we were at the plat­form in under a two min­utes. I pull the fins off Angie in the water, she climbs out, and her arm, from a few inches above her elbow to a few inches below, on the inside, is cov­ered with angry red welts and white swelling — it looked just like the red marks on Dory from Find­ing Nemo — I kid you not.

Kathy and I got the kids out of the water, got Kathy out of the water, and I swam back to get that stu­pid buoy. I hate that buoy. I hate this island.

Kathy imme­di­ately took Angie back up the cliff path to the dive shop, where they knew what to do (they poured ammo­nia on the thing to neu­tral­ize the acid) — and Angie started calm­ing down. Nate stuck around with me to help me carry all the gear back up the hill … and while we were going up, he valiantly said that he’d let Angie play the com­puter games when we got back to the hotel

So … with all that excite­ment, we opted to skip the beach for the rest of the day. We made a lot of jokes about Find­ing Nemo, called Angie “Jelly Girl” a lot — and talked about “thrill issues” and so forth, and got past it.

Later in the day, Nate wanted to go down to the pool — and he and I had a great time in the water, which was a big plus for block­ing any water fear he might have had from this — but I fear the kids may be a lit­tle jumpy about the open sea if we don’t do some­thing soon — so I’m hop­ing we’ll get a chance to get them in the water unvent­fully pretty soon.

We ended up hav­ing a good din­ner — we got back here exhausted — I had the joy of dri­ving in the dark with Ital­ian dri­vers — and all is rel­a­tively quiet.

I fought a lot of urges to ask God to smite this island. Smite smite smite.

Well — what­ever, we’re leav­ing soon. I don’t think I’ll ever want to come back. Kathy says she might some­day with her sis­ter or some­thing. I have no idea why.

Stu­pid island full of sullen … whatever…

by the way — Ital­ian for jel­ly­fish is Meduse … that’s fitting.

Angie’s arm is still cov­ered with big angry red marks.

Good night.

Sardinia: 75% Fail

As I sit here in the lobby of the “spa and resort” we’re stay­ing in, gnaw­ing away at the key­board of my iPhone to make this post because there’s no wifi in our room, I’m star­tled and amazed at what Ital­ians will do to cheat.

Does this place have wifi? Yes, in the lobby. Does this place have room ser­vice? Yes, dur­ing din­ner. Does this place have break­fast included? Yes, cold cereal and auto­matic cof­fee from a machine. Does this place have access to the water? Yes, from stone plat­forms, no beach. Does this place have a restau­rant? Yes, but only one price fixe menu, no choices. $40 per person.

Does this place have staff? Yes, behind the counter, some­times. Does this place have spec­tac­u­lar views? Yes, please pay us $500 per night now. Grazie.

Does this place claim to be a four star resort, that was an anchor of our trip, a break in the mid­dle? A place to rest before trav­el­ing to yet another coun­try? Sure does. Viva Italia, we cut cor­ners at your expense.

Well, we headed to a beach that ended up being a bit of a crowded dump (sug­gested by our hosts). At least the kids liked it. Spe­cial occa­sion for them, we don’t get to the beach much, we’d been look­ing for­ward to that. So we’re not shar­ing with then that ply­wood on the beach isn’t cool. Nate thinks it’s fun to throw it in the water and try to sink it.

Com­pletely dis­ap­pointed in this liars hotel. But, at least the kids will have fun until we have to get up at 4am to catch the only boat out of here.

Rant off. At least it’s pretty and Kathy’s great.

Bye bye Florence, Hello Pisa and Livorno

Flo­rence
Flo­rence, our beau­ti­ful new friend — we love you, Ciao bella! We will try to return! Thank you for a beau­ti­ful time!

We had a per­sonal tour of the city, went to see the David (which is just awe­some, really) — and vis­ited a lot of build­ings and stuff about the city. Hav­ing a guide makes all the dif­fer­ence — our guide, “Ludi”, was so knowl­edge­able, shared all sorts of inter­est­ing his­tory with us — and gen­er­ally was just a great per­son to show us around.

After our tour, we hung around the hotel, rested — did a lit­tle more shop­ping, then on Mon­day we headed out of town towards Pisa and even­tu­ally Livorno (where the ferry to Sar­dinia leaves).

Insert more Ital­ian high­way here — noth­ing to report — basi­cally sim­plis­tic, just fast — no big whoop.

Pisa Sucks
Yeah — that’s about it. It’s a one-trick town — and it’s just encrusted with tacky tourism, creepy African guys sell­ing fake watches right by the park­ing lots (gee, I feel safe leav­ing all our lug­gage, thanks) — and crowds of peo­ple stand­ing around with their hands up to take the char­ac­ter­is­tic pic­ture hold­ing the tower up (like these):

[INSERT PICS of PISA]

Kinda missed this first one — I’ll fix it in Photoshop

I’m very, very tall.

Angie is very, very tall.

This is a very good one — the giant Angie holds up the tower while all the lit­tle peo­ple line up to walk into her pocket.

Nate was of two minds about the whole thing — but will likely enjoy this picture

Here, he is lined up quite well.

Finally, I was fed up with the whole thing, so I pulled it down… there seems to be a small Faye Wrey type per­son to my left try­ing to calm me as I do so… (rrraaaarghhh!)

So once we saw that — we left. The whole place was crowded and yucky — there’s a McDonald’s about 100 yards from us. Blech.

Livorno
Ok. So you’re a city that has a pri­mary port for going to points beyond (kinda like Seat­tle) — here’s a good idea … close off the cen­ter of town to auto traf­fic — oh wait — put all the hotels in the cen­ter of town… hmmm… what else can we do? Oh — I know … let’s take down all the street signs… oh, if only there were some­thing else we could fig­ure out to do … hmmm… oh, make half the streets one way. Wel­come to Livorno — we don’t want you here.

Kathy got a Google Maps set of instruc­tions from the free­way to our hotel. Since the streets have no names — the direc­tions lasted all of “Step 1 — at the round­about, take the sec­ond turn onto Via Aquadutto 300m” … what Via? What round­about? Where are we? Hello?

That was majorly frus­trat­ing — but finally we found a place to stop … Kathy got out and asked direc­tions from a lady (well, I sort of said, “YOU get out and fig­ure out what’s hap­pen­ing…”) … and they chat­ted for a while while the lady told her how to get to the hotel using her hands (I guess she did speak English).

So Kathy came back with hand-written notes that were about 10 steps long.

We headed off … took a turn at the third traf­fic light — took our sec­ond right (did she mean after the two do-not-enter streets?), took another turn, did a thing here, then a thing there — hey look … we’re back where Kathy got out. Let’s try again.

Mean­while — every once in a while, we’d see signs for “Max Hotel ****” … after a few of those — we decided we’d give the good ol’ Max a try.

We fol­lowed those signs, and found the Max — which looked pretty nice — were we look­ing down the bar­rel of another lost fee to a hotel we’d never see? Well, this time, I got out — chat­ted with the lady at the desk — and she ended up giv­ing me a map with direc­tions on how to get to our hotel (the “Tour­ing Hotel” (insert geek joke here about this entire sit­u­a­tion mak­ing even a machine laugh (shout out to Pat))).

SOooo we headed off with our new map (the orig­i­nal Google direc­tions included no map, strangely) … and off we went, into the brink of the restricted zone, pre­pared to bab­ble in Eng­lish and beg forgiveness.

Well — thank­fully … the city didn’t match the map. So we drove around between the well-marked streets and the unmarked streets and the one-way streets and the Ital­ian traf­fic, and the yelling (oh, that’s me) … and the gen­eral ten­sion … and then we found … more unmarked streets … and weren’t we here before??? and shut up and stop honk­ing at me, you jerk … oh, here’s a gypsy who wants to clean our wind­shield … no thank you … what?!! … no — *@#&&#@ to you too, jerk! Sure I’ll get out of the — oh, the light’s green … ok … let’s keep going … where are we? Does the map have this street? Can’t stop here … wait, there’s a sign for OUR HOTEL! Fol­low it … there’s another sign! Yay … wait… there are no more signs … we’re lost again … drive around … back here — where are we going, stop turn­ing the map upside down — ok … wait … I think we’re here… yes, we’re here — there’s the hotel.

Wel­come to Livorno.

On review, the hotel itself is nice. It’s a three-star, which makes it your stan­dard Res­i­dence Inn or some­thing — not too fancy, not too ugly … just right. Trav­el­ing in 3s is fine … 2s, not so much … 1s … well… yick. But I digress.

So, we got all the bags out of the car — Kathy and the kids hoofed them up the tiny tiny ele­va­tor (yes, it’s another tiny tiny ele­va­tor, but oth­er­wise nice hotel) … and we headed to din­ner. We stopped at the Trat­to­ria sug­gested by the desk guy … and then all of the sud­den … it was the hippest place in all Italy. I kid you not … we were stand­ing there, big tired Amer­i­cans — Nate was in his Indi­ana Jones t-shirt, Angie was in shorts, we’re all dressed down for dri­ving, I’m wear­ing sneak­ers … and the square filled with all the beau­ti­ful peo­ple in Livorno:

[INSERT LIVORNO PICS]

So, we slinked out of the Trat­to­ria, headed for a pizze­ria, and had a decent meal as a fam­ily watch­ing Brasil kick Chile around the field.

Next stop — early morn­ing ferry trip — 6am … the day begins with the boat, and (by God’s Grace) ends with the spa/resort on Sardinia.

[I’m cur­rently writ­ing this in Livorno — there’s no wifi, so I’ll post later]

The Colosseum in Rome: Bruce, Chuck, Nate, and Me

This is a recap of a trip a few days ago — vis­it­ing the (most very awe­some) Colos­seum in Rome. It was dou­bly awe­some because they had a spe­cial dis­play going on about Glad­i­a­tors — awesome!

On our way from our hotel, we stopped off at some ruins just sit­ting there in the mid­dle of town. No mark­ings, noth­ing — just fenced off and set apart for pro­tec­tion — but oth­er­wise, pretty unboth­ered. We looked around for a sign, and finally found one that explained that is was orig­i­nally the most famous Glad­i­a­to­r­ial train­ing school in Rome, Mag­nus Ludus or some such name — and it was so well posi­tioned that it had it’s own spe­cial under­ground con­nec­tor to the Colos­seum a few hun­dred yards away. Nate thought that was pretty awe­some (espe­cially when I started talk­ing about imag­in­ing Glad­i­a­tors in each of the rooms, some­times bleed­ing, some­times get­ting ready for great bat­tle — all of them train­ing in a big way). He though that was pretty intense — onward to the Colosseum.

On our approach, we decided to sign up for one of the tours — which was a good idea. We learned a lot about the build­ing (Flavian’s Amphithe­ater, to be exact), and while inter­est­ing — it’d just be blather to fill this blog with fac­toids from the tour (like, did you know that most Glad­i­a­tors actu­ally didn’t fight to the death until the mid­dle ages of the Empire? They were pro­fes­sional enter­tain­ers, never crim­i­nals, never against their will — they were incred­i­bly highly paid per­form­ers — like pro­fes­sional athletes).

We walked around, took a bunch of cool pic­tures — but the high­light was that we all wanted to set up a shot to do homage to one of the most impor­tant moments in mod­ern Colos­seum Glad­i­a­to­r­ial con­tests … the face-off between Chuck Nor­ris and Bruce Lee. So we went look­ing for places to take the shot — and finally found some­thing some­what close (if you watch the actual movie, you’ll real­ize it’s all set — there doesn’t seem to be any­thing actu­ally filmed on site … maybe one shot — but that seems a stretch, to go all the way to Rome for one shot).

So, here is the orig­i­nal face-off picture:

…which is actu­ally not any­where real in the Colos­seum — but with the magic of (very rough) Pho­to­shop — we were able to take this orig­i­nal photo (shot at the actual Colos­seum with two incred­i­bly fierce warriors):

…and make it a bit more of an homage by doing this:

…and finally — for a bit more of the action

…per­son­ally, I think the san­dals add a cer­tain glad­i­a­to­r­ial je ne sais quoi — wouldn’t you say?

…and yes … there IS a pic­ture of me with my shirt off in the Colos­seum, but you’ll never see it (Kathy made me do it to match Chuck)

Crazy times on the way to Florence

So, it finally hap­pened — we got the car and I drove in Italy. The car was a lease of a new car (strange but true) — a sort of weird deal that allows us to take a car and then hand it back and then they sell it as a used car or some­thing — I don’t know … but it’s cheaper than rent­ing a car — so we did it.

Dri­ving in Italy
Every­body needs to calm down. Yes — the Ital­ians drive fast, they drive in small cars on small roads with small lanes — but gen­er­ally speak­ing they’re pretty sane. I had much more trou­ble han­dling the road curves at 130kph than I did with the other drivers.

Most of the high­ways are two lanes each way — so the one on the left is the fast lane, the one on the right is the slow lane, pri­mar­ily occu­pied by trucks. Kathy wasn’t a big fan of the prox­im­ity of the trucks as we whizzed by — but over­all she was ok with my dri­ving (com­pli­mented me when we arrived safely even). The biggest thing is, every once in a while, some­one comes up behind you going a jil­lion kabil­lion miles an hour and demands that you get out of his (always his) way. Well, that’s the cor­rect thing to do in that sit­u­a­tion — and don’t sig­nal while you’re chang­ing lanes either — that’s just not done. Once the crazy per­son flies by — you’re back to dri­ving like a nor­mal per­son at about 75mph (130kph).

Inter­est­ingly — peo­ple will come up behind you on the fast lane, flash at you, honk even, TAILGATE like there’s no tomor­row (a lit­tle tap on the brakes is fun to do — they hate that ) … but they won’t, just won’t, pass you on the right. Never ever ever. So you gotta get out of their way or they just try to scare you more.

I saw one (count it one) Fer­rari on the high­way. Meh.

Assisi
So — after a long drive, with a long detour because I missed a turn — we got to Assisi — where St. Fran­cis is from (founder of the Fran­cis­can order (think Friar Tuck)).

We got to the Basil­ica San Francesco (St. Fran­cis Church) and were get­ting ready to love the art­work, when we saw that a mass was com­plet­ing in one of the tran­scepts. We jumped in, and had a chance to take part in the Holy Com­mu­nion at Assisi (!) … for Chris­tians, that’s pretty cool. Kinda like show­ing up in Mem­phis just as U2 is record­ing a con­cert and being allowed to sit and lis­ten. Just cool is all.

After the Mass, Nate and I vis­ited St. Fran­cis’ tomb, which was cool — and then we all wan­dered around for a bit and then headed to Florence.

Firenze
In Italy, Flo­rence is called Firenze. We drove (and drove and drove) and got to Firenze around 6pm — at which point we started look­ing for our hotel. Dri­ving in Flo­rence is freaky deeky … the roads go in crazy direc­tions — the major­ity of them are semi-pedestrian only — it’s all a mess.

Well — we found our hotel after some crazy dri­ving … and I headed in. First I climbed the 20 steps to get to the first floor, at which point (with the fam­ily wait­ing in the car), I entered the tiny ele­va­tor (tiny, like 4 square feet — like I could only take one suit­case in with me if I tried — like suck in your gut — tiny) — and rode THAT up two more sto­ries — and then got out of the tiny tiny ele­va­tor into the tiny tiny hall­way to talk to the tiny tiny old lady behind the tiny tiny desk next to the sign with the TWO tiny tiny stars on it.

Time to leave. Smile, back away from the lit­tle old lady — there is no way we’re going through this mad­ness to get the lug­gage to the rooms — 20 STEEP steps, to the ele­va­tor, to the next floor, etc etc? No … no no no. G’bye. Mistake.

So, I head back down the tiny ele­va­tor, and see Angie com­ing up the steep stairs — and she’s got that look on her face like things are bad and get­ting worse. I turn the cor­ner on the steep stairs (did I men­tion they were curved?) and down at the door, Kathy is try­ing politely to explain to all the angry Ital­ians behind her that are being blocked by our car that her hus­band has just gone into the hotel and will (shout shout shout) he’s going to be right back (shout, honk, shout) … and there’s a line of taxis behind the parked car on this tiny tiny street — and it even looks like maybe some peo­ple are get­ting out of their cars and com­ing towards my wife.

I’d like to pause here for a sec­ond and ask you to envi­sion the scene. I’ve come to the door of this tiny tiny hotel, and my wife is being yelled at by a bunch of angry men in a dif­fer­ent lan­guage who seem to be begin­ning to pos­ture towards her — and she’s com­pletely fraz­zled … and well… got the scene in your head? Ok. Please imag­ine for your­selves what the proper response would be. Ok. Read on.

Being that I don’t speak any Ital­ian, I had to go to the uni­ver­sal lan­guage of “back the hell off or I’m gonna rip your freakin’ Ital­ian head off and shove it into this guy’s ear.” I didn’t direct that sen­ti­ment at any par­tic­u­lar person’s direc­tion … nor was I seek­ing any direct con­fronta­tion — but almost instantly, my brain-stem needed to com­mu­ni­cate to this crowd of for­eign­ers (this seems to hap­pen to me a lot in for­eign coun­tries (shout out to Brett)) … well … I needed to com­mu­ni­cate, ani­mal to ani­mal, that my wife was not only not alone — but she was mar­ried to THIS guy, so get back in your car and shutu­pay­ouface. So, well … I did — and I regret that it also involved a lit­tle “color” as well. Ask any­body there (includ­ing Kathy) — I acted cor­rectly (though she did just tell me that I swore more than I should have — which I agree to completely).

Soooo … any­way… she got in the car, I got in the car and I was just about to start the car and drive away — when some cop comes to the door of the car and starts yelling at me in Ital­ian (prob­a­bly say­ing some­thing sim­i­lar to what I was say­ing to every­one else). So I showed him the proper respect (after telling him that I didn’t under­stand him at all) — and he waved me away, I drove off, and well … we needed to find a bet­ter hotel.

We drove around a lit­tle crazy for a minute or two — and all of the sud­den … my old friends Prada, Gucci, Cartier and the lot started show­ing up … we were in the right dis­trict sud­denly. Well — we just had to find a dif­fer­ent hotel around here and we’d be fine. After a lit­tle cool­ing off all around — we pulled over in front of Cartier just as it was clos­ing. I got out, and as a woman was com­ing out, I asked her if she could help me.

“Sure.”, she said.
“Well, we had a mis­take hap­pen, and we ended up at the wrong hotel and we need to know where a good hotel is.”
“Oh, this one right here is great. You could also try the Savoy in the square over there, but this one is much bet­ter.”
“Wow — super — thanks. We’ll try to come by Cartier tomor­row and shop.”
“Great, my name is Cyn­thia, look me up, ok?”
“You bet. Thanks.”

So… now we’re stay­ing at a Five Star — L hotel … I’m not sure what the “dash L” means — but it’s nice here. The kids have their own room, we have ours — all is well … we’re get­ting our rest.

Crazy Chances
Once we’d set­tled a bit — Tatiana, our new best friend at the front desk (she’s the one who saved the day and found the rooms for us) sent us to a restau­rant she really likes about 5 min­utes away. We went there — the food was nice, the ambiance was quaint — the folks next to us were Amer­i­can (as were most of the patrons, actu­ally), and we chat­ted them up for a minute or two. Kinda fun.

After din­ner — we were walk­ing back to the hotel — when we stopped because a fam­ily was tak­ing pic­tures of each other on the street and we didn’t want to walk through the photo. They smiled and waved us on — and we headed on our way. As we were walk­ing by them, I said out loud, “these peo­ple look really famil­iar to me — seri­ously” — and we all laughed, just a pass­ing thing, I guess.

Kathy, the kids and I kept walk­ing and I stopped, then headed back to them … hav­ing a vague idea…

They were kind of scratch­ing their heads and say­ing, “You know…” … and I asked them, “Are you Stow­ells?” … and they burst out with “YES! We are!”

It ends up that we just had a chance meet­ing with my sister’s husband’s sis­ter — a woman I haven’t seen since the wed­ding over 15 years ago. I may have seen them at a Chris­ten­ing or some­thing — but wow. We just bumped into each other in … Flo­rence. How fun is that?!!!

What a weird day.

Paris Roundup and Euro Disneybland

So, all in all, Paris was a blast. We had a great time shop­ping — On Sun­day, Angie and I vis­ited the local Museum of Mod­ern Art (saw the largest pigeon in the world), and then the whole fam­ily con­verged and had a great time vis­it­ing the Amer­i­can Church in Paris (cute con­tem­po­rary ser­vice in the after­noon on Sun­day (woot):

While we were headed to the church, Angie and I got on the train and this guy jumped on after us to share his music:

I have to admit, this is prob­a­bly the coolest look­ing French dude I’ve ever seen.

Inspired by the museum, Angie and I made a com­men­tary piece on Abbey Road for her first album:

So … mov­ing right along — we got to Monday:

First I had an AMAZING run for 6.05 miles … I ran from the hotel at 6:30am, through the city, which was empty:

…at which point i got lost … but finally found the river Seine…

…and headed for the dis­tant point of my run…

…lis­tened to alter­na­tive music the entire time…

then ran back to the hotel for a total of 6.05 miles. Sadly, I was unaware of how long a 10k run is (6.2 miles) … had I known, I would have clocked the extra thou­sand feet … but I missed the turn on that one and well — I ran a 9.6k in Paris (there’s always Rome, Barcelona, Madrid and Sar­dinia to make it up).

Soo… once I got back, stretched down, got ready — it was time to go to Disneyland!!!!

The kids and I headed out on the train through the very col­or­ful and beau­ti­ful Metro:

and then got on the R. E. R. — which is a sub­ur­ban train that heads directly to Disneyland.

Whilst on the train, we met a bunch of very excited and funny Irish girls (we’re from Lim­er­ick, have ye been there? It’s much bet­ter than Dublin. You should come and visit!). They too were headed to Dis­ney­land — ready for the rides and stuff, here’s a pic­ture of them:

Dis­ney­b­land

So, what did we think of the place?

…it was ok…

…but we still fig­ured out how to have fun on our own…

I’d say the biggest hangup with Dis­ney­b­land is that it’s run by Euro­peans, mainly French. That’s not actu­ally a hit on them — I think there’s some­thing about the “over the top happy” thing that is uniquely Amer­i­can — and they just don’t get it. It’d be like get­ting the nuance of singing an ancient national bal­lad in French … only the French could sing it with the depth and total affect that is needed — an Amer­i­can might do a decent cover — but could not get the absolute impact.

So it goes with Dis­ney­b­land — they all could care less that you’re there … that’s obvi­ous — that’s France. “Wel­come to Dis­ney, what do you want?” But more impor­tant — they just don’t get the joke, ya know? Dis­ney­b­land — the sul­len­est place in the world (what do you mean by that?).

Aside from one guy on the tower of death drop, who was slightly col­or­ful, there was not a sin­gle giant smile in the place — they couldn’t be both­ered with such effort — for the sake of what? Don’t you know that life is empty and mean­ing­less — have you not read Sartre? Are you not aware that Exis­ten­tial being deems us all to be await­ing our own demise with no hope for the future — like empty bub­bles of point­less hope in a river of heart­less objec­tiv­ity? — would you like grand frites with that? Please, keep your hands and feet in the ride at all times — not that it really mat­ters — noth­ing really mat­ters, does it?

We went on a bunch of decent enough rides — since rides don’t need to really be trans­lated (well, the Star Wars “expe­ri­ence” was a lit­tle less fun because it was all in French) — but oth­er­wise — they are all just roller coast­ers after all. We went on a tower drop like the one in Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. We went on Space Moun­tain: Mis­sion 2 (twice!). We went on an Aero­smith roller coaster, which was pretty ran­dom … I mean — let’s also go on a NY Mets roller coaster, or per­haps a Don­key Kong roller coaster … Aero­smith? Just sort of out there, imho (it was in the Dis­ney Stu­dios park — which is their pass­ing homage to Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios park in Cal­i­for­nia). The rides them­selves were pretty fun, once you slogged through the emo­tional despair that is French service.

But we did actu­ally have a good time — Nate started to melt down at the end because we were all a bit tired (did I men­tion my run in the morn­ing?) … but over­all — we had a decent time strolling around the grounds, and in a bizarre way, sort of enjoy­ing the true magic of Dis­ney by wit­ness­ing its absence in this faux place.

(Final obser­va­tion — not a decent char­ac­ter to be found in Dis­ney­b­land. All the sad sec­onds and sup­port­ing char­ac­ters live there. Their rock­star is Rata­touille — pri­mar­ily because he’s French, after all … but yeah, folks like THIS GUY:)

But the ULTIMATE exam­ple of how much the French miss the beat — it would have to be the “parade” through main street. Here’s the video. Mind you, you’ll have to live through the jostling video — but note a few things:

1 — most of the food shacks are closed (we can­not be both­ered with serv­ing you food, we are French, we sit, we smoke — move along)
2 — the expres­sions and demeanor of the peo­ple in the red jack­ets (who I believe used to work for the Secret Police prior to work­ing at Dis­ney­b­land)
3 — the music … the shrill, des­per­ate sounds of the French try­ing to sound happy
4 — the clear and unadul­ter­ated lack of vis­ceral response in my oth­er­wise happy Amer­i­can kids
5 — the length of the parade as com­pared to the ones in Dis­ney­land USA, which are vast
6 — as a ref­er­ence, I give an exam­ple at the end of how it SHOULD be going — because I’m Amer­i­can, I’m wired for it

[Note: this is a large video, so it may need to stream, click it — poke at it — it’ll even­tu­ally work]

and finally … I posted an album of Euro Dis­ney­b­land pic­tures on Face­book — it’s a pub­lic album, you don’t need Face­book to see it (calm down Pat (shout out to Pat)).

MUSIC!!!!
We got back to the hotel at about 8:30, and Nate was flip­ping out because we orig­i­nally had planned to get up at 5am for an early flight to Rome (Kathy resched­uled the flight — we’re leav­ing at 2pm now) … and he was really miss­ing his bud­dies at home, and his Legos.

I wan­dered out to get some food — found a street crepe the size of my head, but threw it away after the first bite because the “freshly cooked” chicken was actu­ally cold (scary).

At some pass­able sashimi (they don’t know how to do sushi, really — they just have salmon and tuna and serve it in the same plas­tic con­tain­ers that we get sushi in the supermarket)

…and then the music started…

*boom*boom*boom*boom — frenchyfrenchyfrenchy­BOOM — bom­pi­ty­boom­pi­tyscratch­scratch *boom*boom*boom (repeat)

Ya see — it’s “Music Fes­ti­val” time! (Joy).

What this con­sists of is a lot of ran­dom places around Paris just play music very loud — the French all come out in their “rock and roll cloth­ing” and stand around being cool to music. That’s cool … except that some Bistro around the cor­ner from our hotel decided they needed to be the loud­est place in the entire world — all night long.

Well… I could go into how that sat — but basi­cally, we waited until who knows when and the music ended. We got some sleep, and here we are — it’s the AM … we’re headed to Rome — things are going well … the kids are sleep­ing in … and we’re pretty happy.

Next stop — ROMA!

More clothing, and a mixed blessings bank experience

Yes­ter­day, we all went shop­ping again — this time Kathy and Angie got their own per­sonal shop­pers, and Nate and I headed off to the men’s sec­tion for me (Nate couldn’t care less about clothes for him­self for the most part).

So, we had a great time shop­ping in our sep­a­rate camps — Kathy and Angie bought a lot of great stuff, as did I (I bought a lot MORE great stuff than they did — but that’s ok, beats a watch ). So, towards the end of the day, Olga and I are close friends, we’re chat­ting away the whole day in French, talk­ing about what we like and don’t like — meet­ing all the dif­fer­ent peo­ple in the store (she’s a real celebrity in the store, she’s been there for 30 years, every­body loves her, all the peo­ple work­ing there were grab­bing at her for atten­tion at dif­fer­ent times). It was really fun to walk around with her — because we sort of had “run of the place.” All the “you may stand here and wait for your turn to talk about this pair of pants” stuff that goes on nor­mally in a depart­ment store — that was gone … we’d walk up to a spe­cific depart­ment or brand area and the peo­ple would turn, see her, see me, SMILE broadly and imme­di­ately want to help. Mul­ti­ply that by the fact that every­one was French, and you can see how it was fun to have this “back door into the sys­tem” kind of access.

We spent a major­ity of our time at Zadig & Voltaire which is a new favorite brand for me … the clothes are pretty cool. That was our first stop, so Nate was still into it — while he played his DS, he’d look up every once in a while and say “no, Dad, I don’t like that col­lar — it’s too dull”, then go back to his DS. But that wore off soon, and he was ready to do some­thing else.

Well, Olga threw her weight around and we went to the cham­pagne bar run by Moet. Behind them, there was a pri­vate porch salon that was cur­rently closed, but had an enclosed fancy schmancy trans­par­ent tent with sofas and pil­lows inside. She strolled up and asked/told them that Nate was going to use that tent for the day, so he got to hang out in lux­u­ri­ous secu­rity while we rolled around the store buy­ing things.

Towards lunchtime, Olga ran off and got me a foie gras sand­wich — which was pretty awe­some. She came back with the sand­wich and said she had also given one to Nate (uh oh).

“Oh, that’s won­der­ful,”, said I, “let’s go visit him for a lit­tle while?”

“D’accord.”, she said. (happy agreement).

So, we roll up on the trans­par­ent tent, and there’s my brave boy, gamely gnaw­ing politely on this thing that’s been handed to him. She had enthu­si­as­ti­cally handed him a foie gras sand­wich, he has COMPLETELY politely taken it, said thank you, and bit­ten into the thing with­out com­plaint. By the time we’d arrived, she was enthu­si­as­ti­cally ask­ing him if he was enjoy­ing the sand­wich and he was say­ing yes … then she said she was going to head off for a few min­utes as well (per­haps to eat) and would be back in 15 min­utes. “D’accord.”, said I.

As soon as she was out of the tent…

“Daaad?…”, says Nate.
“Yeah, son.”, say I, sup­press­ing a grin.
“I really don’t like this sand­wich AT ALL.”
“Oh, I fig­ured that — I’m really proud of you, buddy, for how you han­dled your­self — really, really proud.”

So I threw myself on the grenade for him and ate his sand­wich too. So now, my finicky boy has not only eaten goat face in Africa, he’s eaten duck liver (this was foie gras du canard, I’m pretty sure) in France. I’m a proud papa

Bank­ing Gone Bad
Ok, fast for­ward to the end of the day — Olga and I are chat­ting away — we don’t got to Eng­lish much, but I’m start­ing to get a lit­tle tired. I called Kathy (using Olga’s spe­cial in-store mobile phone to call the other per­sonal shop­per, because we’re so cool), and Kathy says she’s wrap­ping up. Olga and I are look­ing for a new wal­let (which we didn’t get, even though the folks at Gucci, Ver­sace and Prada were think­ing we should ), when Kathy calls to start talk­ing about how to coor­di­nate her return to my build­ing. Acti­vate moment of exhaustion.

So, I’m stand­ing there, with the phone to my ear, in the Ver­sace depart­ment, Kathy’s talk­ing into my ear in Eng­lish about how she’ll get all her stuff over to our build­ing — and Olga is talk­ing in my other ear in French about how she can han­dle the whole thing for us — and Kathy is talk­ing about how we might want to leave it all here while we go to Notre Dame, and would that be pos­si­ble — and Olga is say­ing that she will com­bien tout l’ensemble ici and Kathy is say­ing that if we could, it would be nice to pick it up tomor­row and Olga is say­ing nous sommes ferme demain and Kathy’s say­ing we really don’t want to take all this stuff with us to Notre Dame and I’m start­ing to spin and *poof*

… hello, this is your brain’s inter­nal French trans­la­tion depart­ment — we have shut down for the evening, you can now only say “chat” and “chien” (cat and dog) — have a good day.

Ok. Un moment. Je ne pense pas qu’il est pos­si­ble for me to make sense out of this sit­u­a­tion quand je parle avec both of you at once.

So — I strug­gle to the sur­face for air — and ask Olga if we can leave every­thing until Mon­day. I’m strug­gling to under­stand her but she says basi­cally that she can gar­ble blark mark Mon­day floop mongo Hotel. I take that to mean that she’ll have the entire group of stuff dropped off on Mon­day at the hotel. Superb!

The sit­u­a­tion is resolved — but please note, I’ve gone from flu­ent French to back of the class­room from that tense experience.

Then Kathy calls back a few min­utes later — “Honey, my card was declined.”

I’m not going to go into too much detail — but these are cards that don’t get declined.

Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, when a snafu like this hap­pens — I’d just call my banker/broker at Schwab, Matt Pick­ett — and he’d flip a switch and all would be well. But Matt’s self­ishly decided to leave because his wife is hav­ing a baby. The nerve — doesn’t he know I’m buy­ing CLOTHES in PARIS?!!!

Well, as a backup, we’d usu­ally call his asso­ciate, Bran­don Siler, who han­dles our “fast and dirty” spe­cial needs (wire trans­fers, etc.). Bran­don is also COMPLETELY self-centered and has left on his hon­ey­moon. I mean, who do these peo­ple think they ARE? I’m buy­ing pants AND shirts. I’ve eaten foie gras!

Well, it’s time to break glass in case of emer­gency. I took the iPhone out of air­plane mode. It shud­dered with antic­i­pa­tion as some­where an AT&T billing com­puter turned its sleepy eye our way, licked its lips and started my inter­na­tional meter.

I called Schwab’s inter­na­tional phone sup­port line. You’d think that the inter­na­tional sup­port line would come in through some voice­mail tree that is faster, since well — it’s inter­na­tional, right? Nope. “Howdy, wel­come to Schwab — press one if you’d like to take a really long time — oth­er­wise please wait just a nor­mal long time for the next avail­able associate.”

While wait­ing, I lis­tened to the play­ful sound of my pock­ets emp­ty­ing into AT&T’s bank accounts.

“Hi, this is Schwab, how can I help you?”
“I’m call­ing from Paris, this is $1/min, my card has been declined.”
“Oh! Let me ver­ify you and then I’ll trans­fer you to the appro­pri­ate depart­ment!” … arg.
…verify…verify…
back to the hold music of my money dis­ap­pear­ing
“Hi, this is Schwab bank sup­port, I under­stand you are call­ing from Paris — do you have a num­ber we can call back?”

Olga, Olga! Chat! Chien! Com­ment t’alez vous?!!! … oh damn … how do you say “I need the phone num­ber for your spe­cial phone so I can get an inter­na­tional inbound call returned from my bank to deblock my wife’s credit card?”

“Je desit un numer pour tele­phone pour ma banque me rap­peller?” (I need a num­ber for phone for my bank me to callback).

insert grap­pling with phone num­bers — coun­try codes (the iPhone bill is still run­ning, mind you) — and then hang up.

Now we wait.

Poor, poor Shelly the Schwab oper­a­tor. It took her about 10 min­utes — but she fought her way back through the snooty depart­ment store switch­board using her high­school French and found us again. I con­grat­u­lated her profusely.

She told me she’d make a note of the costs for the call and see to it that we were reim­bursed for our iPhone charges, and worked to remove the block on Kathy’s card. She said that the block was because Kathy’s card doesn’t usu­ally have this sort of behav­ior — my card would work fine — but hers needed to be cleared (after all, I had no prob­lems yesterday).

Shelly advised wait­ing 15 min­utes, then Kathy could try it again. All very nice — so we do that. Mean­while, Notre Dame is slip­ping through our fin­gers (which ended up work­ing out for the best).

Mean­while — since Olga is just stand­ing around — all the young man­agers from the var­i­ous depart­ments are reach­ing out to her and beg­ging her to help them with things — what, I don’t know … but she’s really peeved by it, keeps telling them she’s with a client … and that’s adding to the tension.

Kathy tries her card again — no love. AAAAaaaarrrghhh…

Ok — we’ll head over there and use my card.

We grab Nate, head out of the build­ing, cross the street to the other build­ing, find Kathy, Angie and Olivia (their shop­per) and every­one is stand­ing in line for a major pur­chase at the teller. It’s a huge line because the guy in front of us (who also has a “lesser” shop­per, it would seem) is try­ing to pay on mul­ti­ple cards. Stand around, stand around.

I sug­gest that Kathy take the kids some­where to eat — which she does. So now I have the room to get my Mal­colm on. I ask if there’s any way we can get around this ridicu­lous line — so one of Kathy’s shop­pers (Olivia had an assis­tant, it would seem) asks if we can cut in for 2 min­utes to run my card. Every­one agrees. We shoul­der our way in — and presto! Card declined.

Rokey dokey smokey — I’ll just be tak­ing off my charm hat now. Here, Olga, hold my smile — I’m call­ing Schwab.

The gang of per­sonal shop­pers scurry me off to the ladies pri­vate shop­per salon — they can tell I’m less than enthused — and I think from my body lan­guage, it’s pretty clear that some poor banker is about to die, and that this isn’t about lim­its or anything.

They sit me down in a chic-chic room for ladies, throw some orange juice at me and run away. Well, most do — Olga blithely sits with me, fully aware that beneath this ter­ri­fy­ing exte­rior beats the heart of a very nice person.

Acti­vate iPhone…

tra la la — Schwab voice­mail prompts –

“Hello, wel­come to –“
“Call­ing from Paris, every­one must die, fix now.”
“Ter­ri­bly sorry, work­ing quickly, please ver­ify.”
“Ver­ify.”
“Trans­fer­ring now.”
“Amber here, ter­ri­fied, wel­come to bank, please let me live.”
“Sorry you are unhappy, fix prob­lem.”
“Fix­ing prob­lem now sir, please do not eat me. Will involve man­ager, please may I call back?”
“Cell­phone num­ber.”
“Ten minutes.”

Chat with Olga — who seems to sug­gest some­thing like “oh, it’s just a secu­rity thing (which it was), let us stay happy.” So we did.

iPhone rings
“Amber here — all is well — may I stay on the line while we con­firm?”
“Thanks, Amber, let’s see how that works out, you’re a really nice per­son.” — oh look, my human­ity — I found it again.

So we all head back out to the teller, I’m chat­ting with Amber, who’s telling me that she was really afraid of hav­ing to call in through the store, because her French is ter­ri­ble — ergo the iPhone call­back. We laugh, we cry, we’re hav­ing a great time.

The French peo­ple all start talk­ing really fast to each other. Olivia is reach­ing around for receipts, tick­ets, all sorts of stuff.
I turn to Olga, who explains that the “work­ing receipt” for all of Kathy’s pur­chases has expired, because they’re only valid for an hour after they are sub­mit­ted and fail. Zut Alors!

So, the hero(ine) of the day is the lady behind the glass at the reg­is­ter. She was fir­ing away at the key­pad, enter­ing the ENTIRE day’s orders by hand at a speed that made me think of Heather on the cal­cu­la­tor (shout out to Heather and her lick­ety split fin­gers!) … the woman types and types — they scan and check and con­firm that every­thing is right. They ALSO apply 10% dis­count on a major­ity of stuff because Kathy had some sort of super duper dis­count card (because she rocks). They ALSO set up the parts we need for VAT (I think?) — so we’ll get another 12% back from taxes. Woot, this is like Christmas!

Mean­while, Amber and I are still con­nected and run­ning up my iPhone bill.

The time had come. I hand over the card.

In a tech­no­log­i­cally inter­est­ing moment — Amber tells me that the pur­chase has been approved … and THEN the lit­tle ticker tape on the desk starts spit­ting out it’s con­fir­ma­tion. Cheers and clap­ping all around. Laugh­ter and relief. Ain’t life grand?

I thank Amber, get her name and con­tact info so I can tell other peo­ple how great she is, and hang up.

“Mon Dieu!”, I exclaim … Olga vir­tu­ally slaps me on the back and com­pli­ments me on my proper use of French. Seems it’s all come back to me now.

After­math
So, we ended up skip­ping Notre Dame, got our clothes back to the hotel our­selves — poor Olga stayed an hour later than her check­out time — she’s a won­der­ful, won­der­ful per­son. Ends up she’s a Chris­t­ian too (we find each other), we chat­ted about that a bit — then wished her well, and she us as well.

Nate and I went off to the local toy store and bought a Lego kit for him as a cel­e­bra­tion of his impec­ca­ble behav­ior the entire day (Olga kept com­pli­ment­ing him on how gen­tile he is (polite)). So, Legos in hand, he was all set for the night in the hotel. Angie, mean­while, had had a great time buy­ing clothes (as any young girl should in Paris, imho), but was tired — so she was all set for the night. So Kathy and I decided to dress up in fancy clothes and go to din­ner alone (the kids were full from their foray in the store while I fought with Schwab).

We headed off to one of the places we’d vis­ited last night. This was a pretty nice place, quite busy — called Les Grands Capucins … which means “The Big Capuchins” (look it up). Big place, lots of activ­ity — a wee bit too much atti­tude… but we were bound to give it another try.

The food ended up being ridicu­lous… there’s an entire story there about me tak­ing on a pompous French waiter and win­ning in his own court — but this post is too long … so suf­fice to say … we had din­ner in spite of the poor service.

We ordered some food, enjoyed each other’s com­pany — and lo and behold… my card was declined.

I decided that the com­pany needed me happy — so I used the com­pany card. I’ll reim­burse the com­pany for din­ner when I get home (shout out to Heather (dou­ble shout out, Heather, woot!)).

I got back to the hotel — called Schwab (again) — talked with Tony — insert dia­log here — he con­nected us directly to Visa Fraud pre­ven­tion … they in turn had a full stop on our account because of the weird pur­chase pat­tern. All is fixed — for now.

Kinda can’t wait to find out what hap­pens next with my card that can’t be beat.

Sacre Bleu!