This is why you never see expensive cars on the streets of Paris
Instead, we hit the road at 5AM and follow the traditional German route to France - through Belgium. All the cratered towns in the history books - Liége, Louvain, and the rest - are right along the highway. With the advent of the European Community the Bundeswehr can leave their passports at home.
We've gassed up before leaving Germany, and the rest of the trip down to Paris is uneventful; we turn onto the Péripherique and - whomp! Welcome to Paris rush-hour traffic. Merge, make our way around, miss the exit we'd planned to take, take the next one instead; we loop around over the ring, and we're going past the Eiffel tower! A bunch more wrong turns follow; the Michelin city- plan book is a fine tool when on foot but not while driving - Eva's flipping pages maniacally, getting nowhere, and getting disgusted.
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| The Peripherique, and the Harms cage under Avenue Foch well stocked with M3s and 540is headed for the US. |
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| Impressive as the palace is, the gardens were even more spectacular, even though if - as a public park - they showed signs of wear. |
We stop to collect our bearings and find that we're a left and a right from our hotel, the Hotel Champ du Mars. Oops, I turn too soon; we decide to park and Eva walks over to the hotel. I decide to drive over and at least unload the bags; I make a couple more wrong turns but by the time I get to the hotel there's a parking spot absolutely right in front. Unbelievable.
It's too early to check in, so we drop off the bags in the lobby and take the car over to the local E. H. Harms agent. A couple more wrong turns, but once we get off the Péripherique and onto Avenue Foch we're right there. There's a Harms sign pointing to Level 1; we pull up in an attended-parking area full of Ferraris and the like. The attendant motions us to leave the car by the side and directs us to a blue door down the hall. The woman in the office asks me to go put the car in the cage - I hadn't noticed, but just past the Ferraris is a cage full of other BMWs including two other 540s, both 6-speed cars. She types out the papers, looks over the car, we sign, and we're back on our feet again.
Automotive note: so far in total I haven't seen more than 20 cars with gasoline engines over 3 liters. As for American products there was one '70s Firebird in Munich, a '69 Mustang outside our hotel there, another later Firebird in Interlaken, an '80s Buick Century with Swiss plates outside our hotel in Bouilland. Plenty of Chrysler minivans - but Steyr-assembled in Austria with four-cylinder turbodiesel engines and manual transmissions. A fair number of Jeeps - a couple big-wheel CJ fashion-victims and a few Cherokees. Fewer Explorers than expected.
But we're now car-less, so it's into the Métro. Métro stations are like the credits scene from Get Smart - every station has slightly different gates, the later ones being virtual floor-to-ceiling barriers targeted at teenagers who seem to do almost anything to get around, over, or through them. The station personnel don't seem to care much.
My first reaction to Paris: it smells of piss, just like San Francisco.
My second reaction to Paris: the whole place could use a good sandblasting.
Urban Paris is generally fairly dirty, with lots of tagging in evidence - Frankfurt and Cologne look clean by comparison. We buy our Métro and museum passes - this is one thing the Paris authorities got right, they'll sell you everything you need at the point of first contact.
We make our way via Métro back to the 7th Arrondissement, stop at a market and collect the usual lunch fixings, then return to the hotel and finish carting the luggage up to our room. The place is clean and well-cared-for, though compact: the elevator can barely accommodate one person and one bag and the room is the smallest we've seen since London in '95. Another place where room size had to be sacrificed to add an in-room shower and potty.
After a brief stretch and half an hour tossing maps around, we strap on the fanny-pack and we hit the street for Versailles. Back into the Metro - surprise! Track work on the RER system, so we have to take an alternate route. The reroute is via an SNCF commuter train that runs RER equipment but RER tickets aren't any good on it...so another FF30 later we're headed for the Versailles Chantiers station. There are shuttle buses available from the station, but there's a continuous stream of people heading out on foot, so we decide to follow. The route takes us past the local Chrysler/Jeep dealership, replete with a new 300M in the window, but Eva's not much inclined to let me browse.
The Versailles palace is huge - but almost invisible behind the monstrous fleet of tour buses in front. We make our way up to the entrance to the château, rent an audioguide unit, and head in.
Alright, so maybe I'm jaded but so far as I'm concerned Versailles is best thought of as a nice park with this big tourist-magnet château hooked to it. It's all very impressive, but by modern standards even the Hall of Mirrors is fairly modest in scale. The gardens, on the other hand, are a wonderful walk and a magnificent sight, even if their condition today might not have met with the Sun King's approval.
Oh, by the way, take some change. The loos cost 50 centimes.
Trains back to Paris run every 12 min until after 10PM...through some fairly gritty semi-suburb areas. Back in town, we stop at a restaurant a couple blocks from the hotel - okay but nothing special. Sleep.