30th Birthday! (Part 1)

The day before my 30th birthday, Dan told me that he had to give me part of my present early because it was "time dependent". He woke me up early on Friday and handed me a book. As I examined the book more closely, I realized it was a mapbook of Paris! My brain slowly put two and two together and I realized that we were heading to Paris! He had rented a car, canceled my jobs for the day and arranged everything! He had even sent out an email to all of our friends, where he had planned a party for the my actual birthday. After which he sent out the real email, leaving me off the list, explaining the trick and asking them all to go along with it all last week.

So we got our car and headed for France! We drove through Belgium and as we entered France, we ran into our first snafu of the trip. We came to a dead stop in traffic on the highway. When I consulted the GPS, I saw that there was an accident 26 km up the road. Surely that cannot be affecting us here, I thought. Well, 3 hours later, I thought wrong.  We sat in traffic for nearly 3 hours to go 26 km!!!! Instead of getting into France about 730, we rolled in closer to 11pm!

But all was forgotten when we drove into the city. Even at 11pm, the city was alive. Cafe's were full of people drinking coffee and beer . The traffic was unbelievable. The French apparently have not heard of a fancy thing called "lanes". There were 3 "lanes" of traffic but no actual lanes. People were weaving in and out, motorcycles driving like a bunch of crazies, and our GPS constantly telling us to "make a half-right". What does that even mean?!!

We finally arrived at our hotel, only to find no parking and no place to even drop off our bags. Dan dropped me off to ask the hotel where the best place to park was and in the meantime, found a parking spot on the street, a little ways from our hotel. He brought in all of our luggage and carried it up 4 flights of stairs, because the elevator was broken.

We got into our room, which was amazing. I opened the window and felt like I was in the movie. The window had no screen on it so I was able to lean my body out and take in a deep breath of French air! Then we were so exhausted that we quickly fell into bed and slept.