20240611 Tuesday, June 11, 2024; Beginning the long journey back home
John and Ciara popped out to the Pain des Jacobins bakery and brought back some Pink Praluline Brioche, a pink praline tart, and a fresh baguette to go with some cheeses they picked up in nearby cheese stores for breakfast. There was no better breakfast to celebrate our last day in Lyon.
A Properly set Pink Praline tart is a thing to behold.
The kids and Tom’s family checked their luggage into storage at the hotel and walked to Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse. It didn’t take them all that much longer to walk there than for us to make it by Uber. In fact, as we were working our way through traffic in the Uber, we passed them walking on a bridge about halfway to Les Halles.
They arrived about the time we emerged the far side of Les Halles after walking through pushing and pulling our suitcases. They wanted to have a gourmet lunch experience but John volunteered to help us with our suitcases to roll them to the train station, which was a 15 minute walk from Les Halles.
As we were leaving, a huge glass skyscraper next door was being evacuated for unknown reasons, causing a bit of a pedestrian traffic jam. Everyone was calm and there were no fire engines or other emergency services, so it may have been a company drill of sorts.
We got to the train station without trouble and said good bye to John who had a flight out in the early afternoon but who was going to join Ciara and Tom’s family on an outing back to the Parc de la Tête d’Or before heading out.
Ben ended up picking up lunch to go from a Five Guys in the Westfield La Part Dieu across the street from the train station once we knew where we had to go to board our train.
The TGV trains run on a pretty tight schedule, but they don’t post which platform a train will arrive on until about 20 minutes before it arrives, and once it arrives, it usually leaves within a few minutes, so it’s best to get situated a bit early and be flexible to get to the right platform once it is posted on one of the TV monitors, and then to find the correct place on the platform that aligns with which car you will be boarding.
It was a little confusing at first because there are big signs along the platforms with the letters A-Z, but below the big signs are small signs with other alphabet letters, but these designate the platform, so on one side of the platform it might have Big letters A-Z down the length of the platform, but all the little one’s will be the platform number which in our case was “H”. There are a handful of monitors along the platform that show where the cars of the train will align with the platform. In our case, car 2 was between the “R” and “S”. If we did this a few more times, we’d be experts.
You do have to be attentive about the stops because there is no onboard display of which stop is next and our train would run all the way to Bruxelles if we fell asleep and missed our Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle stop. It was still a little stressful dealing with our big suitcase and the very limited space in the train luggage area. This time, we did have to move someone’s small suitcase to make room for our big suitcase but it all worked out. What was a bit odd was that we never had to scan our train ticket anywhere to board the train, and nobody came through the cars to check tickets. It did look like our car was sold out, but they do seem to rely more on people’s honesty in France than they do in the US.
Once we got off the train, you end up in the massive Charles de Gaulle airport terminal complex, which is the size of a city. It took us a little bit of searching to find where to meet our Holiday Inn Hotel shuttle bus. To add to the confusion, there is a Holiday Inn Express that is physically attached to the airport complex that is accessible by a light rail, but we eventually ended up at the right curb and Ben eventually found a phone number to call to confirm that a shuttle would be by to pick us up. Our hotel reservation did not include a phone number and Google kept pulling up reservation sites with no direct phone numbers to the hotel to force you to book through their agents. All of our other hotel reservations made through Rail Bookers did include a direct phone number, so they’ll get some feedback on that.
The Holiday Inn Paris Charles de Gaulle is a modern and spacious hotel that caters mostly to flight crews and businessmen.
ADA bath was actually a big minus- shower floods
the entire floor- no squeegee to dry it off. It wasn't
Sloped to drain properly.
It is in the middle of the airport industrial area surrounded by hangers with no services within walking distance, so we were pretty much a captive audience. We could have taken the shuttle back to the airport but that took almost 20 minutes, and then it would take nearly an hour to get back into Paris using the RER trains, so we just set about reconfiguring our luggage for airline check in and checked our weights. We will be flying back to the US on a Delta direct flight from CDG to SEA. It should be about 9 hours flight time. We booked this one Economy Plus. It won’t be much fun, but we’re ready to get back home.
Since there was no place to walk to for dinner, we made reservations in the hotel’s restaurant, the Palm. We decided to just go with the menu de jour, although Google Translate was unable to translate the hand written menu. There was a fillet of fish for the plat or main, and tiramisu for dessert, but we couldn’t decipher the appetizer (entree) or first course.
They did bring out some crostini with olive tampande and a nice bit of baguette with herbed butter to start on.
Then they brought out two large bowls filled with fried baby fish- literally fried fish frys. We were both a bit shocked by the appearance. But they were deep fried in a thin tempura like batter, which made them crisp and light.
Surprisingly, they didn’t taste fishy. The texture was a bit crunchy like French fries, and they were served with a nicely seasoned tartar sauce. There was just a whole lotta baby fishies. At one point, Janet pointed out that the pilot that had rode with us in the airport shuttle had just sat down to eat behind me. I asked if he was still in his pilot’s uniform, and Janet said no, he has changed into a rabbit suit. “What do you mean by that” I asked and turned to look. All I saw was a man in a nondescript grey suit jacket. “What makes that a rabbit suit?” I asked. “Oh, never mind said Janet. When I turned back to my meal, my bowl of baby fishies had roughly doubled in size, and Janet could barely contain her tears of laughter.
They did eventually bring out a fish fillet served on an artistic splash of yellow and green sauces, covered with an orange sauce that looked like the lobster/crawfish sauce that the Lyonnaise Pike quenelles were served with.
There were also some roasted cherry tomatoes and a bowl of grilled peppers and zucchini (courgette here). The fish fillets were pan fried with the skin on, crisping it , but it also dried out the fish. The grilled peppers and courgette were the best part of the plat.
Finally, they brought out their rendition of Tiramisu, which looked like a bowl of whipped cream that had been powdered with cocoa powder. You might joke that the theme of tonight's dinner was the food chain: what the bait ate, what the sea bass ate, the sea bass itself, and finally what the sea bass left behind (pardon the French humor).
At the bottom of the bowl were little crispy bits like the crumble layer in the middle of a Diary Queen ice cream cake. It was a strangely deconstructed tiramisu, but it was light, and after having eaten nearly 2 full bowls of fried fingerlings, I didn’t have a whole lotta room left in my stomach.
Before we went to dinner, Ben noticed that there was a rhythmic thumping like a dance club audible in the room. Well, on the way to the dining room in the elevator we saw that the fitness center was one floor above us (we were on 4, it was on 5).
Who puts a fitness center above guest rooms? Well, after dinner, Ben went up and confirmed this was the case. We hope nobody decides they need to get in a treadmill workout between 10pm and 8am. If you ever book the Holiday Inn Paris Charles de Gaulle, don't book Room 445.
