Arrival and logistics Here is a picture of Bill, Teresa and Sue, after we've pushed our boxes through most of the tunnels we had to push through. We were all dripping with sweat, though it may not be obvious in the photo.

Planes

Our flight left in the early afternoon. Since we had to get to the airport early to bring our kids, we were able to check in with American when there was no line at all. They were unconcerned about the bikes (which we had packed into Canondale boxes because they are the smallest standard bicycle boxes - we wanted boxes 90 centimeters by 120 centimeters because these are small enough to take as bicycles on many SNCF trains), but told us we had to pay $125 each extra! I bargained them down to one $125 charge on the grounds that we were checking nothing else.

Our flights were uneventful except for two things, one good, one bad. The planes both had more legroom than usual, which was very nice for me. And the first flight (Portland to Chicago) served no food (though if you were paying attention, there were bags available for pickup in the gangway - we weren't paying attention).

In Paris we arrived at CDG II around midday of the 18th, and our bikes came up the conveyer belts with everyone else's luggage. We'd made a plan to leave the bikes in their boxes until we got to southern France to expedite train travel. So we kept them in the boxes (in retrospect that was probably unnecessary - last time Sue and I went on a bike trip we unboxed the bikes in the airport since it is easier to roll a loaded bike than to carry a bike box and your stuff).

We'd planned to meet our friends in the baggage claim area (their flight was due an hour earlier). This was silly since there are several different international baggage claim areas at CDG, and they (it turned out) were coming into CDG I, and we were coming into CDG II. We got through passport control and customs (with our boxes) and went on to the train station in CDG II, hoping to see Bill and Teresa there. I got money at an ATM (ATMs make the money issue while traveling in Europe much easier than it used to be - no worrying about when banks are open or wondering what crazy exchange rates they'll charge to change traveler's cheques).
Then I tried to get Bill and Teresa paged at CDG I, and left Sue with the stuff and did a quick (40 minute) circuit of the airport (via the buses taking in CDG I, which is round and small, and Terminal 9, which seems to be mostly another train station). While I was doing this, Bill found Sue (Bill and Teresa had waited a long time for their bikes, and then made their way to our arrival-through-customs place after we'd gone through).

Trains

We wasted a lot of time at the train station. There were very long lines to buy tickets. There were also machines from which one could buy tickets. The machines claimed to take Visa. The RER (local trains around Paris) refused our credit cards. We learned that most of the credit cards in France rely on little embedded chips rather than the magnetic strip in U.S. cards, and probably these machines only worked on cards with chips. The SNCF machines (general trains) claimed to allow you to use visa, and in fact allowed you to do everything up to paying, and when you were ready to pay announced that they took Euro Card and (I think) American Express. Oh well.

Probably if we'd gotten straight in the TGV line when we got there instead of playing with machines and wondering if there was a point to getting in the TGV line we could have gotten tickets to Cahors (or Perigueux) which were the cities we'd identified as good starting points. Instead we got from the RER ticket line tickets to Gare d'Austerlitz, and at Gare d'Austerlitz bought tickets to Limoges. We decided it was a large enough city so that it would be easy to find a hotel at 8pm when we got there, and we could take a train to Perigueux in an hour in the morning.

We had no trouble on the RER with the bike boxes. We had to drag them through the tunnel between the St. Michel-Notre Dame stop and the Cluny-la Sorbonne stop to get line 10 of the Metro to make it to the Gare d'Austerlitz (normally we should have gotten on the line C RER at St. Michel-Notre Dame, but that line, or at least that station was closed for construction. This is a better idea if you have bikes, because in theory, bikes aren't allowed on the Metro). Here are some pictures of us lugging bike boxes around. Sue is wearing red pants, and Bill is Bill. Teresa can be seen distantly in the second picture taking a picture from the end of the moving sidewalk. By the time we were at the gare, some handles on the boxes were broken, and bits of bicycle were sticking out of the bottom of my box. Also, Sue had pulled a bit of her (new, but cheap) Nashbar pannier off (which she was able to repair with Bill's handy heavy-duty sewing tool).

We got to Limoges at about 8pm. It was a pleasant warm day, and the train station there was modestly sized and clean - a pleasure after dealing with Paris. Bill and Sue went off in search of a hotel, while Teresa and I assembled bicycles. Bill and Sue got us a pair of rooms at the Hôtel Orleans de Lion d'Or, which was clean and near the train station. We walked over there with our bikes (carrying our bike boxes). Generously the hotel staff agreed to store our bike boxes until August 31, when we would collect them on our way back to Paris.

At this point we were hungry and it was late, so we went to a simple nearby restaurant (the Vache au Plafond which really did feature a cow on the ceiling) and had a rather pleasant dinner with a very friendly waiter chatting with us in French and English about various things (including the idiocy of the US for not adopting the metric system, and the credit cards with chips in them). Got back from dinner, took showers and collapsed into bed.

The next morning (Monday the 19th) we had a nice breakfast in the hotel; Teresa, Sue and I took a walk around the cathedral district in Limoges, and then we got on our train at about 10:45.

Our train got to Perigueux at about 11:40, but by this time we were anxious to start riding, so did no sight-seeing. It was a tiny bit hair-raising to start our riding on the rather busy roads out of town, and here is the one picture we took, of the very eastern-looking 13th century cathedral. Maybe we'll see it for real on another trip. You can see it was a hazy morning - it cleared up some later.

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