Nous sommes a Paris.
We had a last waddle around the Disneyland park after breakfast this morning, and a final terrifying hurtle around Thunder Mountain.
In fact we were secretly rather glad to be leaving, because the holidays have arrived and there were people in their millions everywhere, cluttering up the place with children and pushchairs and not knowing where they were going.
We had eaten another absolutely colossal breakfast, and reached a family decision that maybe when we get home we ought to eat rather less and consider doing some exercise. This is because all of our trousers have become uncomfortably close-fitting. Even Oliver has had to loosen his elastic-button waistline a couple of notches.
We are not unhappy about this, because they are inches that have been joyfully gained. They are not from awful things like cheap beer and prepacked curry, but from salmon and prawns and Bordeaux wine and piña colada. They are from breakfasts of buttery eggs and crusty French bread and crumbly white French cheese. They are from dark chocolate puddings served with vanilla cream and from smoked garlic sausage served with fat, vinegary olives.
In consequence of an excess of these lovely things we will need to diet when we go home, and it has been worth every porky moment.
Mark had to go with the hotel man to get our car from the car park, because it is embarrassing to start when it has been left for a while, and we thought that the man would find it difficult. You have got to let it turn over for ages, and then not mind the huge cloud of black smoke that comes out of the back.
We loaded everything into it and said a sad goodbye to the land of magical wonder and cholesterol excess and beautiful cocktails, and set off for Paris.
If you have ever driven to Paris you will understand what an adventure that was.
We have got a thing on the phone which helps us find the way to places when we are lost, but it doesn’t speak very good French, and it does seem to get a bit confused. French drivers are not terribly patient with lost English people so you have got to be lost at breakneck speed otherwise people blow their horns. The telephone was not very good at explaining things like roundabouts, but after a great deal of high speed puzzlement we arrived, at our little hotel just behind the Eiffel Tower.
It is a nice hotel. We are on the fourth floor and can see the Tower if we lean dangerously out of the window. We dumped everything and wandered across the road to a little bistro so that we could restock our dwindling fat supplies.
We sat and looked out at Paris buzzing quietly past us, and drank some excellent wine and ate saffron rice, and thought how lovely the world is.
Mark and I had to have a little snooze afterwards, possibly because of the wine, and then we went out for a rotund stroll.
The children had had enough adventures, and wanted to stay in the bedroom, so we were on our own. We went to look at the Tower and pretended that we were still young. We came to Paris once in our much younger days, life is much more fun now.
Afterwards we went to a cafe and drank cocktails as the sun went down. This is an experience I would recommend, do it before you die. Paris seemed to be full of laughing young people, smart and cheerful and comfortable. We thought how few women seemed to be wearing heels, none that we saw actually, and we looked for ages. I thought this was probably a good thing.
We came back to the hotel to find Lucy wallowing in the bath and Oliver playing unsuitable computer games.
Back to the boat tomorrow.
The below picture is of the Eiffel Tower.
I risked life and limb for that.
