USA 2012 - Lunel to Dallas

Well, this blog has revived for our trip to the USA.  I can't promise to keep it up thereafter, but we'll see.  But this will be the first of several posts - associated photos are on my Facebook page.

We were invited to Texas and New Mexico 2 years ago by Mary's cousin Barbara and cousin Alan who live in Midland, to mark M's 70th birthday.  And the time has come!  We found a direct flight from Paris to Dallas Fort Worth, so we set out from Lunel by train on Monday afternoon and caught the TGV to Charles de Gaulle airport.  There we eventually found our hotel (right next to a rail shuttle stop, and very simple to find once you knew) after wrestling with the tangled complexities of getting round large airports - not the last time!  The hotel meal was OK enlivened by chatting to the French couple sitting by us who are expat workers in Brazil and who gave us tips on jet-lag, while our diminutive waitress scurried round trying to keep up with the flood of diners, and ended up giving us free wine because we were nice to her!

The flight to DFW takes 11 hours but on the clock it is 4, so having, in this direction to stay awake we were glad of books and the tedium-breakers which are airline meals.  Boredom also relieved by sideshow like the hostess who gushed over the lavender oil one of the passengers was using, and ended up borrowing it to use herself with cries of joy; and the discovery that the Tex-Mex biscuit snacks served on this American Airlines flight from France were manufactured in Boston, Lincs!!

We only took an hour through immigration, helped by the efficient ESTA online registration system we'd done in advance, which meant our passports were already logged in and all we had to do was to have our fingerprints and photos taken.  Mary's fingers were difficult, whether too moist or too dry we did not quite discover Finding our hotel in Grapevine was not straightforward - DFW and surrounds are built over a huge tract of bleak terrain punctuated by multi-lane highways streaming (at that time of day) with homebound traffic - there was supposed to be a hotel shuttle but we ended up paying over the odds for a taxi.

The hotel was comfortable but isolated in a block with pedestrian access to nowhere, so we had to forego the delights of downtown Grapevine (the name does appear to have something to do with wine since there are a lot of wineries and tasting bars advertised), but the hotel did have a little gym where I discovered a map showing how a whole network of footpaths across the area were planned.  That and evidence of bicyle lanes in Fort Worth later convinced me that all is not lost for non-car drivers here in the US and for tourists like us who actually like to walk around and don't have a car.

As it was the best we could do the next morning (yesterday, Wednesday) was to catch the hotel shuttle back to the airport and wait to meet our friend Judi who flew in from Louisville at 1230.  We wanted to spy out the land for our journey home, which involves flying in from Albuquerque and then on to Paris, and we were initiated into the lmysteries and relative simplicity of onward travel and checking in just once with hold luggage automatically transferred from the local to the international flight, by a charming man on duty in the concourse - one of a whole string of people official and just passers by who have been friendly and super-helpful ever since we joined the checkin queue in Paris.

Judi arrived and, after another muddle involving a dinky little overhead train service circling the airport, which she did not need to take, and the kindness of a woman travel agent who called her on her own cell phone since our French ones turn out not to work here, we all set out in the hire car for an overnight stay in the University/cultural area southwest of Fort Worth.  The roadworks and hold-ups on the way were colossal and we had to ask a motor mechanic for the directions back to the Interstate 30 turn we'd missed, but we got to the (near-clone of previous) hotel in time for a late lunch in a nearby Tex-Mex, then in the hot evening sun (temperatures consistently 30°+ by day and mid-20s in the evening) we visited the Botanic Gardens which are really lovely, and ended up in a wine bar run by a South American emigré who kind of knew his European wines, though the very pleasant sparkling Italian muscat we drank turned out not to be the moscato d'Asti we'd ordered from the menu but a moscato delle Venezie - not familiar to us, and with a crown cap closure!

On to Austin today and another post in a couple of days' time.