DATELINE: Lille, France

And here we stay.

We have had to scrub the Normandy/Brittany trip altogether.  Mr. C is much too sick to go anywhere except to bed.  So we will be at this little hotel over the weekend, then head back to Paris for perhaps two weeks, perhaps less.  He just needs to rest, cough, sneeze and get it all out of his system.  I am hoping I don't get worse, but with one really sick guy filling the air with his germs it's going to be a miracle if I don't.  At least we have the Marais to look forward to.  We had to move out of our room and into a different one up a floor higher under the eaves of the building.  Larger, which in this case means more IKEA furniture!  But it will be just fine for a couple of days.

First thing I had to do this morning was cancel the car rental.  I walked over to the train station to the rental office and the rather snotty young chap behind the desk was of absolutely NO assistance.  He sent me on my way saying I had to figure it out myself.  I got on the computer and the rental site was also of NO help.  Its service site is completely circular; you can't get where you need to go to click on some CANCEL button.  I finally send an email to some obscure address I located and QUICKLY got a message back that they were so sorry but I notified them too late so I have to pay the whole rental cost.  If the site had had a usable contact link I would have been well under the time to cancel.  Nothing is going right for this northern visit!

So since we're staying the next big activity was to lay in stores.  We walk over to a huge shopping mall to with a big fancy market.  I felt very uncomfortable while in this mega-mega mall; thought about Westlake Mall in Kenya and just wanted to get the heck out.  We now have a full 'fridge, lots of dried soup, some charcuterie things for dinner, plenty of water and wine.  Now all we have to do is amuse ourselves until Monday morning.

Europe changes to Standard Time tonight so it will be light before 8:30  AM!