the end of Paris

In the morning, we packed up, and headed out to the taxi stand just up the alley from our apartment. You know, the one that always had a line of like, fifty taxis hanging around. The one that, this morning, for no apparent reason, had exactly zero taxis. It took us 20 minutes to get a cab.

We picked up our leased Renault, a lovely car, with a GPS unit in it named Tom-Tom, which stopped working almost immediately. The car had 3 km on it when we picked it up, and 5 km on it when the GPS died. We had no map to speak of. We were in Paris traffic. Somehow, after many hours, we ended up outside of Paris, and eventually on our way to Switzerland.

We got to Bern, and had a poor printout of a corner of the city from Google Maps to guide us to Katrin's apartment, and with the help of a phalanx of Swiss cops (or security guards?) we made it there. Katrin and her boyfriend Benjamin had made a wonderful and welcoming dinner for us, which we loved. Benjamin is a social worker, working in a home for profoundly mentally disabled victims of bad treatment, helping them age comfortably into death. It's a noble cause, and I very much enjoyed hearing about his work.

Ria had a blast with their little Jack Russell Terrier, Basel, and vice versa. In the morning we walked to the botanical garden down to the river with the dog, and then took off for Annecy, France, which will hopefully be the site of the 2018 Winter Olympics.