France (29 Apr - 5 May 24) - Day 1 - Travel

For ages I had wanted to visit the Normandy beaches in France - the site of the World War II D-Day landings by the allied troops. I'd also wanted to revisit Paris after having been there when I was younger.

We found a week where the Wednesday was a public holiday and booked in a week of travel - Monday to Sunday.

The trip started as a disaster. Enough of a disaster that I even ended up needing to write a travel disasters entry in the blog as a cathartic exercise.

Below is an except from that post that details the start of our trip. If you've already read that post, feel free to skip forward to the next =====

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This trip was one I was most looking forward to. A chance to see Paris and the Normandy beaches and to travel a new part of the world. But it did not start well and while the trip was amazing, it was plagued with issues throughout.

We started with a 5am wake up to get to Copenhagen in time for our flight at 8:15am. It turned out that there were two 8:15am flights to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris (but we didn't know that part) and since we had arrived early there was only one on the first board - 8:15am at gate A6. We headed to the gate and took some quiet time to recover. After some time, Cameron made a comment that he would have expected that we should be boarding soon, which should have prompted me to check the destinations board. Instead we waiting until the flight was boarding and noted that it was SAS, and we were Easyjet. Not a problem, a lot of the flights codeshare, flying under another airlines tag. But when I went to scan my ticket I got a big red cross and was told abruptly by the lady behind the desk that we were Easyjet not SAS.

We raced out to the departures list and saw that Easyjet was in terminal F - the furthest terminal from terminal A.:

We raced through the airport, managing the expected 28 minute transit in about 10 minutes, but we were too late, the gate was closed and the stairs were moving away from the airplane. We'd missed our flight.

Since it was our fault, we were at the wrong gate and the departure calls for gates F were not played in the gate A area, there wasn't much we could do. To get a 'repair' we could pay £110 each (about $200 or 1500sek each) and they would try to get us on the next flight. Kris and I did some online searches and managed to get us on the 1pm flight for 4000sek, which was a much better deal.

Our flight was uneventful (except for a 45min delay), but our troubles continued at the car rental counter in Paris. There were two staff and a single customer, but it still took an hour to serve us. We had advised them online about our later flight, but the Toyota Corolla that we had booked was no longer available. Since it was listed as a 'compact' car we were offered an alternative compact, a Toyota Yaris. The Yaris was much smaller and was never going to be able to fit us all comfortably. They had a Qashqai available but since it was considered a bigger car we had to pay extra for it - another 3000sek for the week. As we were leaving the desk another customer arrived to pick up a Qashqai and they were telling him that it was no longer available... whoops.

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First view of the Eiffel Tower from the plane

After getting the car, we had a 3.5 hour drive to Normandy. We stopped after an hour to pick up some dinner and shopping and then pushed on.

The route was full of tolls, about €30 in total.  Kristine was rushed at most of them by traffic behind us, so when we finally got to a quiet one she was excited to check the screen to see if there were any options for a continuing ticket etc.  Unfortunately the screen at this one wasn't much help:

We arrived at our apartment at about 9:30 and it was really nice - comfortable with lots of room and a washing machine and dryer.

We got to bed fairly early ready for an early start the next day.