It’s been a while since we’ve added to this blog. Someday, I will retroactively add in posts from our trip with family to Central Europe last year. But for now we are off on yet another trip to France—this one starting with a few days in Toulouse before we join a food-themed tour of Gascony. We’ll conclude with a week in Bordeaux.

Our travel strategy—to purchase Premium Economy from Air France and try to use points to upgrade to Business so that we can lie down on the overnight flight—did not work, as all the business states were sold. I slept little if at all.

After landing in Paris, I noticed a text from Véronique, the woman who will be our guide on the tour of Gascony:

Welcome to France.

After a long taxi, the plane stopped in the middle of nowhere, and a bus took us on a grand tour of Charles de Gaulle. I thought perhaps we were being taken to Lyon, but we were still in the Paris airport when the bus finally stopped. The first sign of strikes came at passport control. There were two people working to inspect the 500 or so of us coming in on international flights.

When we got to Toulouse, and told our cab driver the address of our hotel, he said he could get us close, but streets were blocked by demonstrations. Supposedly there were 50,000 people in the streets. We saw no sign of the masses rising up, but it was a short pleasant walk to the hotel.

It was too early to check in to our room, so to kill time we went across the street to Belini Pizzeria on the large square in front of the Capitole. So our first meal in France was … pizza. It was good though. Cantal (cheese), bacon, sun-dried tomato, burrata.

After a nice nap, we took a stroll around the neighborhood. Afterward, in lieu of dinner, we went to the hotel bar for a drink, or liquid dinner. The new guy was learning how to properly balance items on his tray, and discovered that taking the carafe of water off the tray drastically changes the balance. Unfortunately, he was standing over me at the time he made this discovery, and the Aperol Spitz I ordered, plus Pat’s Kir, soaked my pants before the glasses hit the floor and shattered.

On the positive side, our replacement drinks were on the house. And so were the peanuts.