Kissed our puppies Merlin and Cody goodbye and jumped into Chris’s yellow cab. Chris had been referred to us our good friends Marc and Muriel, and he was prompt, courteous and funny all the way to Tucson International Airport.

We settled in for dinner (vegetarian Indian curry mix) and a movie (We chose Mad Money out of a list of 300 movies.) The flight took us northeast over Texas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Maine in the dark of night. I followed familiar skymarks such as Scorpio and Jupiter off to starboard until, at 11:00pm on my watch, the morning sun rose mighty, clear and shiny, ready to march west, from whence we have come. A thick blanket of soft clouds has covered the Atlantic since we made seafall at Gander, Newfoundland. In the dark blackness of night, the massive starboard wing looked for all the world like the monstrous tail of some prehistoric creature. As day broke, a sliver of moon preceded the marching sun, and we knew that beyond, farther to the east, lay France’s ever-beckoning City of Light, and farther east lay Israel, Tel Aviv, Meira and Shlomo.

Arrived at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle airport, cleared customs, caught the shuttle to the Paris Hilton (get it?), called Verizon to deal with a world-phone snafu, then took the RER train into our beloved City of Light.

The weather is drizzly so we donned our scarves and leather jackets, just like many times before in this magic place, and jumped off at ground zero – Notre Dame. More crowded with tourists than we remembered, we braved the hordes and admired her ancient stones for a while.

Next Day