ALOFT HOTEL SAN ANTONIO AIRPORT

It all started with a great deal. The Hotwire gods shone down well on me and for $153/night, we got the Hilton by the Eiffel Tower. Pretty cool. Well, not so much.

We were leaving Zurich and took the train to Basel. I didn’t know enough to realize that I should have gotten a reservation on the TGV to get to Paris. Train travel in Switzerland is so easy that it lulled me into thinking that everything would be easy.

Of course, we are lugging a bunch of luggage. I pack for myself and the boys. I tried my hardest to pack light (I think we will run out of clothes exactly in time… and may run out one day early which is not that good if it happens). Regardless, Heather was not impressed with my packing job from the get-go and indicated we had too many bags (3 for me and the boys). The way it works out, it means that each family member carries a bag (the small boys have a smaller one, just larger than carry-on size) and the adults have a large bag. I also have Heather’s bike case. We also have Grandpa Greg, Karen and Matthew. They were packed really well and only had like 2.5 bags for the 3 of them.

Back to the story. We got to Basel and found out we had to kill 6 hours before we could board the train to Paris. Not too bad, but we were not very good at killing time. We did everything we could to kill time, but it made it a long day just having to be stuck there. Heather had the good idea of where to stow our luggage at the train station, so at least we didn’t have that worry. We did visit Basel, but it is not the most interesting of cities.

We board the train to Paris and have a nice ride on the TGV. It is comfortable and calming. That calm was the one before the storm. We were arriving in Paris on July 14. For those of us who had to suffer through “ecoutez et repetez” for a few years in high school know that means Bastille Day. Kinda like Fourth of July on crack… sorry “craque”.

Did I tell you I got a good deal on our hotel? That means that we got a nice hotel right by the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Friggin’ Tower is the epicenter of the aforementioned Bastille Day. Oh, and we arrived on the Metro while the event was breaking up. As Heather put it, it was like dropping a non-US family of 4 adults and 4 children into Times Square at 11:59pm on December 31. I would say it was more like 12:05am on January 1 with everyone trying to get away from Times Square (or, in this case the Eiffel Tower and the Hilton).

For those in Atlanta, it would be like telling your worst enemy (and his family) to get off of MARTA at the Lenox station when the Lenox fireworks were finishing and telling them to carry their luggage to the Ritz Carlton up the street. Oh, and make sure the elevators and escalators don’t work. And, make sure that most of the crowd has had too much to drink. And, pick the worst enemy that doesn’t speak the English. Then, multiply by 10 or so. You get the point.

I won’t go into seeing the police wrestle a guy and cart him off in the Metro. Or having to carry our bags up and down stairs in the Metro (BTW, I recommend the institution of the French with Disabilities Act so we can get some darn lifts for luggage at stations). Or having the guys pulled aside directly in front of us by gun-toting riot-gear-wearing police officers who search them for bombs. Or being redirected by police to different stations and having to try to board packed Metro cars with all of our luggage as we watch train after train pass without room thinking we would never make the 2 stops to our hotel.

What was scary and the worst was when we were about 100 yards (sorry 91.44 meters) from our hotel and we had to line up the adults and kids strategically in a single file row to try to get through the mob (and I mean mob… uncontrolled swings of the crowd like a mosh pit, people not moving at all then moving quickly, firecrackers and random fireworks going off, etc.) to our hotel. Going those 91.44 meters probably took us an hour (it is almost 1am at this point and the boys have been on the go since 7:30am).

It was an hour where we were elbowed, yelled at by French people, pushed and shoved. Jack was pick-pocketed by the crowd. Luckily he packs weird things in his pockets, so they got two tubes of mustard and nothing good.

Due my time spent ecoutez-ing and repetez-ing, I was able to understand the bulk of the insults. They didn’t include the phrases “Thanks for Normandy!” or “We appreciate you being nice to us when we visit your country”. Jack didn’t understand the insults and said he was probably happy that he didn’t.

Regardless, we made it through. It was, though, one of the worst parenting decisions that I have ever made. I put the family at real risk and didn’t think through the situation. I guess that is how you learn, but I would rather not learn this close to the edge. It was truly frightening for everyone and not something that I would like to repeat.

We would have been much better off ha

The Hilton Hotel in Manchester, England