Nancy Says Hello

So I actually made it to Europe – for a while, I wasn’t sure it would happen. Wednesday got off to an unauspicious start at 5AM when American Airlines called to say “Your flight has been canceled”. But then they continued “and you’ve been re-routed through Dallas”. The Dallas flight got in only an hour after the canceled Chicago flight was supposed to. And the AA agents were really nice to me – the first one counted my huge duffel bag as a ‘boot bag’, which meant that I only had one extra piece: the bike box. She could have charged me excess baggage fees, but only hit me up for the standard $110 international bike fee. Then when I got to DFW, I checked at the gate and there was an exit-row seat left for me!

After retrieving my mountain of luggage at CDG and getting it all on one cart,

I trundled through the airport trying not to maim people with my ski box and got to the Peugeot pick-up desk. They sent a van over for me and took me to pick up my brand-new Peugeot 307 station wagon (diesel, 5-speed, supposed to get around 50mpg). I got everything inside, filled the tank and set out for parts east. In all the travel literature I’ve read, I’ve never seen a 250-mile drive recommended as a cure for jet-lag. After a couple of espresso stops and some odd thick fog on an otherwise sunny day, I pulled into Nancy about 5PM.


Here on the south side of Nancy there are 3 hotels in a row, all run by Accor. The ‘high-end’ is the Novotel, mid-range is the Etap, and I’m staying in the Fomule 1. F1 hotels have all the comforts of home, provided you were raised in a Stalinist labor camp. The formula seems to be to cut out everything you can – there are no power outlets in the room, the bath towel is the size of a hand towel, and there don’t seem to be any toilet seats. But the WC (down the hall) goes through some kind of strange cleaning cycle after you leave, with all kinds of whirring noises coming through the door and a red light telling you not to enter, so it probably passes the stringent EU sanitary requirements.



I’m looking forward to spending a night in a horizontal position.