Friday, July 20, 2018

locked and loaded pour la France

For my trip to France this October, Kayak.com had some super-cheap deals (around $570, round trip) with semi-reputable airlines. I went with Air France, which originally charged about $940 for the ticket, but by the time I was done buying the ticket, the price had gone up to about $990, thanks to a raft of extra, tacked-on fees. My credit card's asshole is sore and a little bloody from that experience, and I now have to adjust my unsinkable budget to take this purchase into consideration, but that's just a matter of shifting some numbers around. I had originally planned to purchase my France ticket next month or the month after, but I saw that Kayak was offering "green day" deals right now, which is what prompted me to talk to my boss, then purchase my current ticket right away. (I don't think my ticket was actually a bona fide "green day" deal: that was more for the China-based airlines.)

So I'm now good for both my August trip to the States and my October trip to France. The dates are more or less locked in. I need to talk to my French buddy Dominique about how, exactly, I can get to his bed & breakfast, La Demeure du Marais ("Fendwelling" in English, or the less romantic-sounding "Home on the Marsh"—but the place doesn't actually look marshy), located in or near the town of Le Vanneau-Irleau. (I just discovered that a "vanneau" is a "lapwing" or a "plover" in English, i.e., a type of tiny shorebird. By contrast, typing "irleau" into my French dictionary gives me a "forme introuvable" result: un-findable! Will have to do more research.) I see there's a train station in the much larger town of Niort, so I'm guessing I can grab a train from Paris to Niort, then find some way, maybe via a local cab, to get from Niort to Le Vanneau-Irleau.

Am very excited to travel to the US and France this year. I had wanted to do this last year, but it would have been too much to do my Seoul-Busan walk and then fly out to two far-off countries for two weeks each. I haven't been to France since 2007. Dom's kids, except for the littlest, are almost all grown up now. Hard to imagine.



2 comments:

Charles said...

Sounds like that will be fun! How long has it been since you've been back to France?

Don't know what a "green day" special is, but I'm assuming it means that all in-flight music is taken from the Dookie or American Idiot albums, with some newer stuff from Revolution Radio. Please tell me I'm right.

Kevin Kim said...

Ark ark.

I didn't know what else to call it, but when I accessed the departure and return dates in the site's calendar, I saw that some of the days were marked with a little green dot. A nearby legend explained that the green dots represented dates with especially cheap flights.

Now go have the time of your life.