June 6, 2013: Des Moines, the way the Rich and Famous do It

It all started on Tuesday, when I got a routine question:  could I be in a meeting in Des Moines on Thursday?  Sure.  It's a 3-hour drive so I figured there'd be an overnight, but I can do that.  I realized this would be different when they told me whom to contact to get added to the manifest and requested my weight.  That's when I started to get excited.

The trip took off from Charles B. Wheeler Airport, also known in these parts as The Downtown Airport, and known everywhere else as MKC.  I'd never flown out of this one before but my Dad had, as a business traveler in the 1960s, which made it a special destination for me.  It was an easy trip, only 6 miles from the office and I got there with some time to play tourist and get some pictures.  Below is the view of the skyline from the tarmac.

Before my colleagues arrived I had the copilot snap this shot of me at the door of the plane.

Wheels up was at 10:30 AM, as scheduled.  I had sent the pdf of my itinerary to a fellow airplane geek and he had looked up the tail number.  He identified the Beechcraft model number and suggested that I might want to bring foam earplugs in case the cabin was noisy.  I brought my Bose phones and was sitting with them clipped around my neck, turned off, like a good little Sheeple, and realized I was waiting for the captain to turn off the Fasten Seat Belt sign to turn them on.    I turned them on.

I settled back and watched podcasts for the flight, which was less than an hour, then discreetly tucked my camera into my computer bag so I wouldn't walk into the client meeting looking like a tourist.  The meeting went well and our team  was pleased with the company's interest in our proposal. 

We got back in time to leave 15 minutes earlier than scheduled.  No problem- they could do that.  Goodbye, Des Moines.  I watched the clouds and the cornfields and listened to classic rock music.

 

And hello, Kansas City.

I drove back to work, checked my e-mails again, changed into Spandex and headed out to the local corporate athletic events, where I finished the 800 meter faster than last year (4:29) but not faster than the boss (2:15).  Always good to let the boss win.

Paris- Introduction

Ron and I had both been to Paris before, but not together.  I had visited Paris only once, in 1977, and he had been there on business a little earlier.  With our tenth wedding anniversary approaching, we decided that this was a good destination to see together.  We redeemed an insane number of airline miles to get to Paris in Business Class and with only one stop (for half the miles we would have had to change planes in Chicago AND Miami), but it made a major difference in the quality of the trip.

May 17: Arrival in Paris

We're always a bit dazed when we get off a transatlantic flight since we rarely get any sleep.  Fortunately, it didn't take too much wandering around to find the station for the suburban train into town, get tickets and figure out what Metro stop we needed. 

Our hotel, the Courtyard Boulogne-Billancourt, was too far from central Paris to walk, but we enjoyed living in an area with a lot of residents and local businesses.  Our walk to and from the Metro every day led us past some good grocery stores, several pharmacies and a wonderful bakery.  It also meant that we could book a reward stay on Marriott points. 

May 18: Notre Dame

Notre Dame celebrates its 850th anniversary in 2013.  We joke that wherever we go, they seem to cover the most beautiful cathedrals in the world in scaffolding just before we visit.  This time, Notre Dame had been extensively restored and was uncovered in all its glory.

As we got out of the Metro on our first full day in Paris, we were treated to the sight of a large food market. 

Plenty of wonderful French cheese.  We enjoyed every molecule of cholesterol.

We also noticed that booksellers had set up their wares near the Cathedral, which we've seen in a lot of cities in Europe.

A couple of interesting things happened in the two days after we visited the Cathedral.  The following day a very conservative writer committed suicide in front of the altar, in protest against what he considered to be a deterioration in moral values in the country.  The day after that, a militant advocate for women's rights and gay rights bared her breasts in front of the same altar to advocate her positions.  Both were unfortunate desecrations of a holy place, but cathedrals have always attracted the tourists, the mendicants, the pickpockets, the merchants, the pilgrims, and the occasional fanatic with an agenda.  Some things don't change over the centuries.

The Memorial to the French citizens who were deported to the concentration camps in World War 2 is tucked quietly away behind Notre Dame.  A few guidebooks are starting to mention it.  This is a picture of the outside;  they ask that you not share pictures of the inside on the Internet.  It's well worth a sobering visit after Notre Dame.

Ile St. Louis is connected to Ile de la Cite, where Notre Dame is located, by a small bridge.  We spent the rest of the day exploring the area.

May 19: The Louvre

The Louvre is always at the top of the must-see list for visitors to Paris and, since we loved art, we decided to make a visit.  In some ways, the Louvre is a victim of its own success.  A few hundred million other people wanted to be there that day, too. 

Exterior entrance at the famous I.M. Pei pyramid.

Considering its popularity, the lines to get in weren't too bad.  Once we got in, though, we found the Louvre bewildering to navigate, with too few posted maps, and the AudioGuides (set up on small tablet computers) hard to read.  They showed icons of art works, but they were so small you couldn't see what you were looking at.  A couple of friendly American tourists showed us how to get to the screen where you just punch in the number by the artwork to get the description, which helped. 

We did have a nice lunch in the restaurant, although it was the most expensive meal on our trip.  Here's Ron, anticipating his meal of steak tartare, which the waiter thoughtfully reminded him was raw beef when he ordered it.  He said it was delicious.

Here's an example of the hordes- this, of course, is the famous Venus de Milo.  The crowd around the Mona Lisa was worse.

Finally, we decided to leave.  Except we couldn't find the way out.  The signs pointing to the Exit were all directing us to emergency exits- a valid purpose, but not if you want to leave without setting off all kinds of alarms.  When we did get to the Pyramid where we'd entered, the escalators up to the ground floor were blocked by silent guards.  There was a large spiral staircase up, but Ron found it a bit intimidating.  The only people allowed onto the elevator were displaying handicapped IDs, which Ron didn't have.  We were told that the closing of the escalators had something to do with the fact that it was raining.  Ummm,  OK.  Finally, after I got a bit dramatic and told a guard in French that we just wanted to escape, she showed us escalators behind us, which led out of the building. 

We've visited most of the major museums in Europe and we're pretty tolerant of crowds of tourists- heck, we're tourists, too- but we found the Louvre too chaotic to allow appreciation of their impressive collection.

May 20: Musee D'Orsay

Ron is a great fan of Impressionist art and I've learned enough from him and from our visits to other European museums to share his love of this type of painting.  In Paris, the Musee d'Orsay is the place to see the best collection of Impressionist art.  On-line reviewed warned about long waiting lines, so I purchased and printed out tickets the night before on-line.  I'm not sure it helped; we still had to wait outside for over an hour to get in.

Statues on plaza outside the Museum.  These were meant to symbolize various civilizations, with France at the left.  The rest were bare-breasted.  We were amused because in Kansas, a single bare-breasted statue in a park caused a huge uproar.  Here, they're part of the scenery.

The Museum started out as a railroad station, which is easy to imagine from this view.

The D'Orsay was better-organized and not quite as crowded as the Louvre, but we found that the best of the Impressionist paintings were in a room with an inflexible traffic pattern (one door in, one door out, with the herd moving in one direction around the perimeter) that didn't really allow contemplation of the works.  We found what we were looking for a couple of days later, when we went to a wonderful exhibit of Slovenian impressionists at Le Petit Palais.