Paris to Singapore

Our flight was about 10 minutes late leaving, but arrived about 20 minutes early, so here we are now in the airport transit hotel, which was so brilliantly arranged by our fabulous travel agent, Kylie. Every regular traveller should have a Kylie in their life!

Forgot to mention earlier, that our bus ride to the airport was eventful. A separate coach company is used for airport transfers. There were 9 of us (including AH and Joe), so we were all seated towards the front. Our driver wasn’t at all chatty, but that didn’t matter. Traffic was reasonably light at it was 7 am on a Saturday. We had only been driving about 15 minutes when we scraped the guard rail on the right of the bus, the side I was sitting. The driver slowed down, but then kept going. I couldn’t see him from where I was sitting so asked the couple sitting directly behind him, if he was falling asleep as that seemed a reasonable conclusion from his poor driving, so they asked him if everything was ok, and he said yes, so we all kept our eyes firmly on the road from that point on. There had been a serious car accident on the freeway to the airport so that slowed us down considerably too with bumper to bumper traffic, but we eventually got past the hold up and were at Terminal 2 before 8 which was what was meant to happen. J and I needed to be dropped at Terminal 1 which is the old airport, so it didn’t mean much to us, but Terminal 2 is kind of in a figure 8. All the 7 others needed to be at Terminal 2, Gate E. The driver literally dumped them at Gate A and told them the gates are all connected, so they were left on the pavement with their suitcases, knowing that they were meant to be being met by an Insight person to help them with checking etc. Poor Buggers, especially Joe as I have no idea how they were to find their way to the proper gate as it is a maze. Anyway the driver leaves them and heads to our Terminal, but as we are arriving at our Termina1 he gets a phone call which he answers while driving and it is clearly the Insight lass trying to locate her 7 passengers at Gate E. I just hope everyone got to where they needed to be, as our driver didn’t care less. We have been so spoilt by excellent Insight drivers, that the morning’s bus ride was an experience of what shouldn’t happen. I’m just pleased we got to our correct spot in one piece!

So that little experience was now behind us. Our flight was uneventful, although I boarded the plane minus my toothpaste as apparently a half empty 110gm tube of Colgate toothpaste has the potential to bring down a plane so it was confiscated at bag check! Watched a couple of movies, ate too much and had a couple of glasses of a fabulous French Chardonnay, followed by lots of water. It got quite hot on the plane but even though I was on my flat bed trying to sleep, I didn’t think it reasonable to disrobe! Didn’t get a lot of sleep, keeping in mind we lost 6 hours straight away due to time difference . As we had a midday departure, I was trying to force myself to sleep at about 10 o’clock Singapore time but it was only 4 pm France time. Anyhow I was comfortable and most certainly better rested than what I would expect for a 13 plus hour flight squashed into economy seats.
We currently have showered, are accessing the free wifi for a while then I’m aiming to sleep for a few hours til we go for lunch (which is included in the transit hotel deal). (Kylie included the day hotel for us, which was about $230 as a separate cost.) We have the room for 12 hours which is an absolute god send, so will check out at about7 pm, thencheck out the duty free shops and then head to the Silver Kris lounge until our midnight departure.

Now to some stories about two of the characters on the second tour.

You may recall on an earlier blog entry, that I mentioned that the fire alarm was going off in our hotel, and when I went to check at reception, I was ignored, as the staff member was busy giving Sylvia some toilet rolls. Little did I know until later (and this info came from Shona) that the next day, Sylvia was telling Shona that she was a criminal as she’d stolen a toilet roll and tissues and secreted them in her luggage! She then went on to say that she had folded up the quilt on the bed and put it...., at which point Shona is having conniptions, convinced Sylvia is a kleptomaniac and no doubt the hotel will be calling her soon to complain about the stolen property, but Sylvia finished her sentence by saying that she folded up the quilt and put it in the corner as it was too hot on the bed! The woman is an absolute cracker! Her New York accent makes me want to laugh out loud every time she speaks. Apparently she was a lecturer in Russian literature and speaks about 5 languages, however much of the time I’m sure she doesn’t know what day it is...
At yesterday morning’s breakfast she came and sat next to me. It must have taken her 10 minutes to sort the food out on her plate, which only consisted of an orange and a couple of pieces of bread. At one stage while I was up at the buffet getting something I saw her at the cheeses trying to cut some. When I asked her if I could help, she thought she was cutting butter, so I got her a butter packet from a nearby bowl, and she left the cheeses alone. From that point on, I was her ‘angel’. At 88 she has certainly lived a full life, but she really shouldn’t travel on her own. While she was trying to open a sugar cube packet to put in her coffee, she dropped the packet in the tea. Digging it out with a dessert spoon, she called herself a ‘pig’ but we managed to have a giggle over it anyway. I think I got up from our table at least twice more to get her things, like a knife, as I couldn’t bear to watch her go through the process of checking out every item on the buffet again... I must say though, that as ditsy as she is, she laughed at all my jokes, and thought I was hilarious. Good grief, I thought I was back at work dealing with one of my kittens, then I realized that I’m off to Broome with 15 of them in about 3 weeks. I’m thinking that my days of herding kittens are coming to a close, as it really can be bloody hard work. And as much as I was critical H and A’s lack of wardrobe change over the 3 plus weeks, Sylvia wore the same thing every day, adding a black beanie and round dark sunglasses when outdoors and in the coach. However I did notice she. Hanged her socks once, as the earlier pair she had been wearing for days were ankle socks with a rubber band holding up the top of each sock. Bless her!
However, that’s not the purpose of today’s ramblings.
Now to Joe, who is in his 80s and lives in Las Vegas, previously of Pennsylvania. Joe walks with a walking stick, does not have a left hand and has fingers missing from his right hand. Due to his disability he was very slow when our group did any walking tours, and often Shona would need to try and locate a wheel chair for him to push him around. there aren’t lots of good pavements in Europe and we were visiting beaches and tunnels and quite a bit of stair climbing and walking on uneven cobblestones, so he was choosing not to do a number of things, just like Sylvia who often wanted to simply stay on the coach to sleep or search repeatedly through her carry on bags for goodness knows what, as she never seemed to find it. At one stage while Shona had her hands full with Sylvia I helped Joe with some small thing, can’t even remember what it was. He was worried that he was being a nuisance, and I said something stupid like that it is my lot in life to wait on men. Joe’s actually quite shy, but he told me that I reminded him of a movie actress, so as long as he wasn’t referring to Lassie, I was interested to hear who I thought it might be. Well, according to Joe I remind him of Betsy Palmer. I hadn’t heard of her, but he knows all his old movies and claims to have met lots of the stars most particularly since living in Vegas. Apparently she was in a movie with Tyrone Power (or is it Powell) so from then on, he called me Betsy and I called him Tyrone. We became extra good mates at the champagne testing as he was sitting at the back of the room so I kept going up to the counter and getting his tastings each time, and every time, he called me Betsy.Then another older African American guy on our tour Sam, who was spending some time with Joe (mainly because his wife was always shopping every chance she got!) and he decided I looked like Betsy too, so that’s who I was to these guys.
At our farewell dinner two night ago when I went around the tables, taking photos of everyone, when I took Joe’s photo he referred to me as Betsy and so had to explain who he says I remind him of. With that, 2 of the Australians from Melbourne said, “No, we think she looks like Evonne Goolagong”. What the???
So I leave it with you to decide who is right. LOL.