Nous sommes arrives-- vrai, sans nos velos-- mais à la fin de la journée, tout est bon.

Okay, so perhaps I didn't compose that all by myself in French but many of the words were in my thoughts as I was writing. Thank goodness for Google translate to correct me.

But it is indeed true that we arrived in Paris-- feeling pretty confident because the flights had gone smoothly--without our bicycles! Not long after he reached baggage check we heard our names called over the intercom with a lovely French accent asking us to come to a British Airways representative. Our bikes had not made it through the connection in London. Merde! We were told that they would would be arriving on a later flight sometime in the afternoon and would be delivered to us.

In retrospect maybe we should've stayed at the airport to wait for them because of the inherent logistics of our situation, considering we do not have phone service in France and no easy access to the Internet, and no arrangement to meet up with our bicycling compatriot where we were staying until after 6 PM. But we chose to be the mules, and instead of having our bikes do the work, we lugged our gear through the Paris Metro and to the quarter where Philippe lives. He was at work all day, of course, so we sipped a beverage at a corner café, tried to get through to British airways baggage with the help of a friendly garçon and his personal cell phone (though I was on hold for much too long and never succeeded), sent an email to BA after finding a small Internet café, and observed simple Paris life go by for a few hours while thinking about when we could really get the adventure started. 

Granted, we didn't get to cycle into Paris and see some of the sites from our saddles, but long story short (well, not too…) by 1130 last night, our bikes were unboxed, still slightly dismantled but locked up, and we were finally getting to sleep, after being up for over 36 hours with just a couple hours of sleep on the first flight. The morning is clear, though, the bikes are now put together, our gear is reorganized and ready to be loaded so that bikes can be the mules again, and now we are about to step out and finally get to see some Paris!

Sorry no photos yet. We were a little preoccupied yesterday :-)