à Angers

Bellingham to Angers: 4,630 miles (Thanks, Google Earth) door to porte (Thanks, Google Translate). And, it only took .00001545 second. (Thanks Google Teleport). Iceland Air from Seattle via Reykjavik is about as close to a straight line as we could have gone. In case you're wondering what town is closest to the exact half-way point, it is Pangnirtung on the west side of Baffin Island in Canada's nu-est territory, Nunavut (Thanks Wikipedia). Like most travel in the modern world, the exciting parts of the journey are reserved for the the first and final fractions.

It's too bad that we don't have pictures of our Friday night bon voyage party that our B'ham neighbors put on - complete with French flag toothpicks, fondu, and beautifully un-French Boundary Bay IPA (We're gonna miss that beer... I mean those fine friends). But we do have photos of our ride to the Bellingham Airporter shuttle stop. Shellane our house-sitter dropped us off at the Airporter Shuttle. As journey-legs go, this was similar to Steve Martin's hitch-hiked ride to the end of the fence in The Jerk.  But it gave us our first shocking glimpse of all of our luggage in one place.  (Shellane's friend and master photographer Erin drove a second car). It was a pile to be reckoned with.  And then, possibly inspired by the obscene mound of cordura, I thought It'd be fun to get a picture of someone associated with each leg of our journey.

Next, Jim from BelAir Airporter Shuttle was our driver. Maybe it's because I'm a quasi transportation professional that I thought parsing the modes of our journey would be interesting.  Or maybe it's the precarious imperative of blogging to split up everyday categories (like a trip) into smaller and likely less interesting parts.  In that case, thanks for reading this far.


At SeaTac, Iceland Air weighed none of our bags. This was no doubt karma gained by several scale-checks the night before and a last minute redistribution from the heaviest bag (won't name names) to the kids' and my bags.


Brynhildur and Svana got us set up with pillows, blankets, and fizzy glacier water. Apparently, the word for lime-wedge in Iceland is "bæti mi" (and they don't even have them). At  Reykjavik we did NOT have time to go buy Icelandic yogurt (sorry Erica). This was partly because I had to drink the entire contents of Ella and Ivy's water bottles to get through security (still not sure why we had to do security there) and so used my extra time finding a snyrting.


We had checked the train schedules before getting into Paris and were sure we'd never make the 1:16 to Angers. We were set to wait around for one that left at 3:30 or so. But, when Kristin finished up at the ticket counter, the agent noted that we had two minutes to get to the train (yep, it was 1:14). This is where our extreme sherpa skills almost broke down. It was kind of like an episode of 24 except Jack Bauer was a family with three kids hauling 170 pounds of luggage each. Where the script called for three-steps-at-a-time leaps down the long skinny escalator, we had violins too wide for the turnstiles and tipped-over roll-aboards caught up on twisted nylon straps. But under the threatening screech of the conductors' whistles, we managed to heroically shove our selves and suitcases into the steep narrow opening of the wrong train.


This was not as uninformed an error as it sounds but it was indeed a rookie move. Our train was attached to the train we boarded. We're not sure we would have made it on at all if we'd run the extra 80 yards or so. But on board, a very nice conductor (who Kristin was surprised to find understood her French) told us (Kristin) how we would get off in Le Mans and run back to the Angers/Nantes train which, after that point, would split off from the train set we were part of. He was older and slightly less fashionable than his colleagues at right. [There's actually more to this chapter mostly to do with multiple movements of the luggage itself which I've chosen to leave out of my memory as well as this blog.]

So, we arrived at the Angers train station. The site director Sue got Kristin's voicemail and found us zoning out sitting at some tables near the lobby. We got two cabs and made it safely to our apartment. All we had to do was carry the bags up six flights of stairs.