Onward from France to Mauritius and our ship

We closed our time in France with a great lunch with Christian’s sister and husband in Goudargues.

When we got back we took the Christmas tree down, packed up our stuff that stays in France and drove 8 hours back to Paris to the airport.

This began the trip from hell 😦

The Hilton that I booked – you couldn’t pull the car up to the door, there was a hill from parking down to the entrance. Only one luggage cart in the entire place, you had to roll it up a ramp and then roll it down again. Because this trip was both cold/snow weather and hot/tropical/safari we could not pack as light as we would normally do so it was a challenge. The room I thought we had booked was misrepresented so I had to go on a “tour” of available rooms to find one that worked for us. OK, great, we think we get settled. Then Christian notices there was shit on the outside of the toilet, and not a little…. yuck! Tell the desk, the poor girl has to go clean it herself and we go and do have a very nice dinner. Come back and our room has no hot water. They give us a key for another room to use in the morning for showers —- really?

So after tromping down the hallway to start the day and hauling the luggage back up the hill we are off to fly to Mauritius standby on Air France feeling OK – we are off to the next step of the adventure. Not so fast… have to pay to check two of our bags … but fine. Then we get to the pre-security screening and find out there is a carry-on weight limit, but AFTER we had checked our large bags. So in the middle of the airport we’re on the ground trying to consolidate the heavy but not valuable stuff into one carry-on that we now have to check. Good, do that, meet the weight limit. And then get middle seats for an almost 12 hour flight with seatmates from beyond hell lol. I won’t go into the details but it was an ugly flight!

Get to Mauritius and one bag goes temporarily missing but we do get it (thank god for air tags). Get the car and drive to our apartment rental in the beach town of Pereybere for New Years Eve.

Had a great dinner on the beach with fireworks over the harbor, but then at midnight….