Goodbye to the UK & family, Hello Paris!

The morning after the wedding was looking like it was going to be hectic. Roy and I needed to get our 80kgs of luggage from Witney to Oxford to London and on the train to Paris. To do that, Roy's Dad was to drive us to Oxford, drive back to Witney to finish his packing, pack all of their luggage into the hire car and go back into Oxford so they could catch a bus to Heathrow so they could catch their plane back to Australia. Ah.. breathe!

We ate our breakfast in the hotel, showered, packed and loaded our luggage into the hire car. We said goodbye to Roy's family and hopped in the car to be taken into Oxford. We had about four hours to kill in Oxford so we dumped our luggage in a nearby hostel, paid a small fee and headed into the city. After a final explore of the Motherland, we got our luggage back, caught a taxi to the train station and boarded the train for London. After having four weeks of travelling light, I think we forgot what it was like to lug 80kgs of stuff around. Poor Roy! Most places we went required many trips to get our luggage from place to place.

After a few hours on the comfortable Eurostar we made it to Paris! Contrary to what we were told by numerous sources that Paris was full of rude people, dirt and rats, I thought it was a very beautiful city full of helpful people. No one seemed to mind that we weren't fluent in French (in fact we didn't know much French at all). Our taxi ride to our hotel was great because our driver spoke English extremely well and he even took the time to explain to us the taxi system in Paris. He told us that he didn't want us to go away from Paris thinking that the taxi drivers there were lousy con-artists, since you get charged for supplements like extra passengers and luggage on top of the meter price. We arrived at our hotel and were glad to get our mountain of luggage into the room which to our surprise and delight was an executive suite! They had upgraded us for free! After weeks living in mostly shared hotel rooms, we found we had so much room to move that we didn't know what to do with it.

Lounge room - coffee machine, LCD TV, mini bar fridge and a desk.

"What do we do with all of this room?"