May 11/12, 2016 Vancouver to Paris

I will give a little background to this trip .......for Jeff's 65th birthday I plotted a trip to take him on the Camino.....by train. I particularly fell in love with the Parador in Leon. While the girls (Joanie, Sandy, Jan and myself were on the Camino we treated ourselves several times to "nice " hotels instead of the usual pilgrim fare) Now here we are almost two years later finally fitting it into our busy lives.
We left Vancouver on British Airways, slightly delayed.....and that was to be the pattern for the days travel to Paris, delays in London as well.  We managed to keep our cool, which can be a challenge when tired and delayed.
On arrival in Paris we walked for seemingly miles to retrieve our one checked bag, then more  miles to find a toilette! Finally we were outside the terminal getting a taxi. Fixed price of 55euros to our hotel. Timhotel is walking distance to the SNCF train station where we will be heading tomorrow morning.
Our cabbie was a transplant from Cambodia, very pleasant, travel time was about 40 minutes from the airport.
The hotel is in the Montparnase district which is full of small restaurants and boutique hotels. We checked into our room and since it was now 10pm we ventured out for a light meal and a glass of vino just 45 meters from our hotel.  Pilgrims, we are a stones throw down the street from the Odessa Hotel which we stayed in on our last girls visit.  The restaurant was run by 3 young fellows one of which spoke passable English, we had a lot of laughs ordering our pizza.....with buffalo meat (seemed a cross between carpaccio and prosciutto ) very good anyway, with handfuls of arugula and shaved Parmesan on top. I finished off with a latte which was drowning in whipped cream. On leaving the restaurant we asked for the card so I could mention it in my blog.....the Oggi, our waiter was Giovanni. He gave us the trip advisor card as he thought we wanted to comment on trip advisor!
We will be having a lot of language gaffs I can tell!
We stopped to purchase some water across the street.....good thing we hadn't ventured far as the rain is coming down!
So ends our first travel day, we have a 7:30 wake up call, not trusting ourselves to wake on time. Tomorrow will be interesting  as we have some close train connections !
Bien Nuit!