Paris, day 0 -1
On March 13 I flew from White Plains, NY to Detroit in order to meet up with my Mom for our flight to Paris. White Plains is only about 30 minutes from where I live & work and it’s much easier to go there rather then schlep to Newark or JFK. If I haven’t mentioned it before, I hate driving more than 20 minutes or so at a time and since I never want to take anyone to Newark or JFK, I will never ask anyone to take me there. End of that story.
The flight to Paris was fairly uneventful. Northwest runs an A330 on the DTW-CDG route and the seats all have their own entertainment systems, which is half nice and half annoying, because if you’re not wearing headphones you can hear what everyone else is watching/listening to. I didn’t sleep very well on the flight but I snapped back together once we arrived in Paris. We quickly cleared passport control and made our way in to the city via ‘Les Cars Air France’ a.k.a. the Air France Bus from CDG to the Arc de Triomphe. We dilly-dallied around the hotel for 45 minutes until our room was ready, then we dropped off our things and headed out for the day.
Walk, walk, walk. First stop? Lunch! Granterroirs was on our list of places to try and since it was in the general direction of where we wanted to go for the day, we did! Granterroirs is a restaurant/gourmet food shop and they sell a wide variety of gourmet ingredients from all over France.
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It was cozy and very busy when we arrived but there was a small table for two just waiting for us. Mom had caballaud with vegetables (carrot, zucchini, perhaps summer squash) in a phyllo pouch with a beurre blanc sauce and salad. I had deliciously marinated salmon (raw, essentially like thickly sliced gravlax but not salty) drizzled with hazelnut oil and a nice green salad. With a little Polaine bread on the side, it was a wonderful start to the afternoon. |
In our jet-lagged state, we knew we wouldn’t be up for anything intellectually challenging so we designated our first day as a shopping day. After lunch, we meandered over to Printemps to pick up some of the things we’d planned on buying, like fancy French face cream and new Longchamp totes. La, la, la I love Printemps. We spent a couple of hours there and then took a nice long walk back to the Champs Elysees.
We stopped at Paul to pick up a pain aux raisins for Mom and a cafe creme and croissant for me. We back to the hotel to enjoy our treats, relax a bit before dinner, and plan for the next day. Relaxing was very relaxing indeed and we decided we were too pooped and not hungry enough to go anywhere major for dinner. We decided to have a picnic in the room, so we headed down the champs a bit to get sandwiches at Pomme de Pain. The last stop of the night was Laduree. The late hour meant there was a limited selection of pastries and macarons to choose from and we settled on a tarte tatin and three small macarons: cassis violette, cafe, and caramel au beurre sale.
