May 10-11
May 10-11
I forgot the one thing I had to do in the airport before leaving--get a plug converter. Right now I'm writing with my laptop cord snaking around the corner to the shaver outlet in the bathroom...they always say shavers only but it works just fine. To my surprise I managed to get a few hours sleep on the plane so I wasn't a total wreck when I arrived in Paris. I got stopped at customs for the 1st time in a long while but nothing came of it. And I wasted about an hour in the TGV station (that's the high-speed train) in Charles de Gaulle -- French banks have introduced new credit cards with an embedded chip, and if you don't have one, you can't get a train or subway ticket from the vending machines (no cash either). Once I realized I wasn't going to get through the long-distance ticket line in time to get the one TGV to the SE from CDG, I had to get in another line to get an RER (kind of an express subway) ticket to Gare de Lyon, where most of the trains to Grenoble leave from.
Getting there was fine -- the bike, in the bag, only weighs about 13 kg -- less than my backpack, to the surprise of the woman who weighed them at the Air France counter in SFO. So I could toss it on my shoulder for the stairs and escalators on the RER and in the train station -- I would imagine that these facilities are wheelchair accessible, but the elevators weren't in obvious locations... I got a 16:04 (sorry this is all going to be in metric and 24h time...) direct to Grenoble and sat back and relaxed. And got kind of bored pretty quickly. There wasn't an outlet for the laptop, and in my haste to pack I had completely forgotten the stack of 6-8 back issues of the New Yorker that was supposed to be my travel entertainment... The countryside was pretty, but not too varied -- green fields, little villages, patches of forest (very legible, highly-managed looking forest...) and here and there a bright yellow field of some oilseed -- safflower? rapeseed? I knew once but I've forgotten.
Approaching Grenoble things got a little more dramatic...I was trying to figure out what it reminded me of & realized eventually that it's like a (considerably) wider version of the Yosemite Valley -- dead flat in the town/on the floodplains of the rivers, with walls of forest and stone rising up all around, lots of snow on the summits to the E (the Alps proper). I began to think this could be a tough place for cycling.... (With Google Earth you can go to Grenoble with the terrain display turned on and get a reasonable idea of what this looks like. Pics below are a few from the city center.
Found my nice, clean hotel, with a small room and matching set of towels that say "Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza" on them. The hotel was right around the corner from the train station, chosen to avoid Slightly obsessed, I reassembled my bike -- takes about 5 minutes thanks to this great bag (from Scicon, about $300 but I rented it for $45 from a guy a few blocks away from me in Berkeley--thanks again for craigslist). Then got a prix fixe Vietnamese dinner around the corner and went straight to sleep -- slept at least 11 hours, through breakfast at the hotel, and woke up fresh and ready to ride.
I forgot the one thing I had to do in the airport before leaving--get a plug converter. Right now I'm writing with my laptop cord snaking around the corner to the shaver outlet in the bathroom...they always say shavers only but it works just fine. To my surprise I managed to get a few hours sleep on the plane so I wasn't a total wreck when I arrived in Paris. I got stopped at customs for the 1st time in a long while but nothing came of it. And I wasted about an hour in the TGV station (that's the high-speed train) in Charles de Gaulle -- French banks have introduced new credit cards with an embedded chip, and if you don't have one, you can't get a train or subway ticket from the vending machines (no cash either). Once I realized I wasn't going to get through the long-distance ticket line in time to get the one TGV to the SE from CDG, I had to get in another line to get an RER (kind of an express subway) ticket to Gare de Lyon, where most of the trains to Grenoble leave from.
Getting there was fine -- the bike, in the bag, only weighs about 13 kg -- less than my backpack, to the surprise of the woman who weighed them at the Air France counter in SFO. So I could toss it on my shoulder for the stairs and escalators on the RER and in the train station -- I would imagine that these facilities are wheelchair accessible, but the elevators weren't in obvious locations... I got a 16:04 (sorry this is all going to be in metric and 24h time...) direct to Grenoble and sat back and relaxed. And got kind of bored pretty quickly. There wasn't an outlet for the laptop, and in my haste to pack I had completely forgotten the stack of 6-8 back issues of the New Yorker that was supposed to be my travel entertainment... The countryside was pretty, but not too varied -- green fields, little villages, patches of forest (very legible, highly-managed looking forest...) and here and there a bright yellow field of some oilseed -- safflower? rapeseed? I knew once but I've forgotten.
Approaching Grenoble things got a little more dramatic...I was trying to figure out what it reminded me of & realized eventually that it's like a (considerably) wider version of the Yosemite Valley -- dead flat in the town/on the floodplains of the rivers, with walls of forest and stone rising up all around, lots of snow on the summits to the E (the Alps proper). I began to think this could be a tough place for cycling.... (With Google Earth you can go to Grenoble with the terrain display turned on and get a reasonable idea of what this looks like. Pics below are a few from the city center.
Found my nice, clean hotel, with a small room and matching set of towels that say "Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza" on them. The hotel was right around the corner from the train station, chosen to avoid Slightly obsessed, I reassembled my bike -- takes about 5 minutes thanks to this great bag (from Scicon, about $300 but I rented it for $45 from a guy a few blocks away from me in Berkeley--thanks again for craigslist). Then got a prix fixe Vietnamese dinner around the corner and went straight to sleep -- slept at least 11 hours, through breakfast at the hotel, and woke up fresh and ready to ride.
posted by Derick at 4:59 AM
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