May 31, 1967
May 31, 1967
Morning brings a very bad day weather wise. Cold , cloudy and rainy. After breakfast love we are off to Paris. Heater is broken on bus. We are all cold. This will be a long trip. We have breakfast at 6:30 am and we leave at 7:00 am. Joseph doesn't expect to be at Paris till 8:00 pm at night!. Bus is cold. Make ourselves as comfortable as we can and weather improves as we go along. Pass interesting village and history laden little town. Rest stop at Troges, but first we go through town of Allkirch and other Alsace Lorraine territory. Hitler marched in here in 1940. People here had a time in this territory has changed hands back and forth. Fought over before WWI and during WWII. About here Ted offers much history along the way but since I left my diary I am not able to remember as much or write it down.
Forget about best paid for lunch by Globus. A very good one. Antipasto and beef - cheese and fruit, etc. I think it was in Alkirch. Which is before Basil Switzerland where we bought the goodies and had the rest stop.
See a few women, men, with wooden shoes. Mountains off from Lucerne to Basil. At Troges we have delightful pastries and buy cookies, candy, chocolate. Joseph handles the bus like no other driver can. Other tour passes us up. On outskirts of Paris we pass him but they arrive ahead of us anyway. We get into traffic jams that are absolutely impossible to believe. Yes, it's true about cars in Paris - worse than London or Rome.
We are in open phase of Paris where our hotel St. Lazare is located. It proves to be one of the best and not far from things. Our room is large and good. Now we are on our own for meals. We freshen up in twenty minutes and our Chinese friends and us start out - while bus was driving to the hotel, we do see some of the Paris sights and people, a beautiful city which we discover on sitting out to be more and more beautiful. We love Paris !!! Here we are 1/2 an hour from our hotel stop on the champs de lysees. We see Le Arc De Triumphe and tomb of unknown warrior. We find ourselves on place de la Concorde and see the fountains. This is late at night. 9:00 pm and we still haven't eaten supper. We see part of the spires of Notre Dame - other things we don't recognize. We are trying to find the student Sorbonne - It is facinating. We luckily stumble into a french restraunt that is crowded to the hilt with people. Go upstairs. Voila it has Italian food. We have a pizza, scampies for two and lamb brioscettes and a bottle of wine and then sour cream and strawberries. We walk some more and stop for a beer after we get weary and footsore and thirsty. Here I know I have forgotten to jot some things down.
Many more characters - oh so great! Paris already is fantastic. We go to bed late.