Quist World Tour

Doing what they do best: electronics of any form. A seven hour drive from Paris to Singen , Germany made up the most of our day. I can’t tell you much about the first hour or so, since I slept through that part of the drive. I can, however, tell you more about our rest area experiences. When I started this blog, I had no idea that it would turn into a serial harangue on public restrooms in Europe . After all, I’ve been to Europe before, I know the public bathrooms are not plentiful or free, and I’m over it. But driving gives it a whole new dimension. So when we started in France a few days earlier, I mentioned the porcelain pit toilet that we encountered. I said it was possibly worse than the automatic flushing toilet for those toilet-training children. I had no idea it could be even worse. On the way out of France , we stopped again. This time, we were looking for a picnic table and were happy to find one with a bathroom nearby. Little did we know. Again, the modern pit toil...

Love this city. Natalie started our day by scrambling eggs for all of us. We didn’t rush it, knowing this was our last full day of sightseeing. Brian packed a lunch for us, and off we went. First we went to the Louvre, the enormous museum that we considered skipping altogether. But it’s not terribly expensive, and Rita suggested that we just pick a few things to see. That’s what we did. Of course we went to see the Mona Lisa. We had heard it was small and much more modest than its fame suggests, and that was true. However, many would-be pop stars dream of paparazzi like this. A huge crowd of people maneuvering to the front of the line to get a photo of a painting they don’t really seem to look at with their actual eyes. Her colors are rich and deep, and the painting is subtle, and it’s completely at odds with the mob scene played out before it! We examined the Wedding Feast at Cana , found the Venus de Milo, and then made our way to the Napoleon III apartments. The canopy bed is ve...

This morning we packed up from our splendid stay at the Splendid Hotel, after a better night’s sleep since the party across the hall had moved out. The shower plan is this: everyone stays in their bed either sleeping or reading while someone else takes a shower, trying to ensure a bit of privacy in spite of all the glass doors. It seems to work. We made a quick stop at the bakery for some chocolate pastries to go. As sad as it is to leave the Alps behind, our real apprehension was another long driving trip. We knew we would have a couple of nights free yet on this trip, and one option was to go see a couple of places in Switzerland . We immediately nixed that plan when we started looking at hotel prices in Switzerland . Un. Be. Lieve. Able. So we picked the second most expensive place we could find, Paris . Really, Paris only came up because it was a place that our children wanted to see. It seems a good 5 hour drive from Grenoble , and the drive from Paris to the town in Germany ...

This morning we didn’t have to make the decision—will we have cereal in our room again or venture out for an expensive but tasty breakfast? Which was good, considering that some sort of party was going on in the room across the hall, which involved numerous groups of people coming and going, knocking on the door and waiting in the hallway, laughing and running around until 4 AM. The kids slept through it, Brian would wake up, hear a bit of it, and fall asleep, while I lay there with a pillow over my head, trying to control my rage. At one point, I did pop my red-eyed, frizzy haired blonde self out the door and, lacking any French, said “Shhhhhh” very forcefully. The 4 people in the hallway giggled and got a bit quieter, but then they went into the room across the hall and more people took their place. Let’s just say that, upon waking, I was not in my finest mood. No matter. Rita was serving breakfast. Back we went for more Selles hospitality: Chocolate muesli and croissants made every...

The rain poured down overnight, and the skies were clearing as we rolled out of bed. Today we leave Italy behind for France . After getting our gear packed in the car, we drove to the road along the beach that would take us northward. I got a chill when Brian said, distressed, “Oh no, we just missed it.” I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about at first, then I realized that we had come to a one way tunnel. We had hit one yesterday, and the sign then told us that the light would turn green every 10 minutes. This tunnel’s light would be green at 5 minutes after, 25 minutes after and 45 minutes after the hour. We got there at 9:47. So we parked our car for the next 18 minutes at the red light, and I took a little walk to see the beach in daylight. Such a lovely summer town—I would love to see it in full swing. The drive took us from our beach town up through Genoa , Turin and on to Grenoble , France . We think we spent as much time going through tunnels as out in the open! We s...