The Emotional Rollercoaster That Was Our Paris Picnic

The plan after D'Orsay was to have a wine, chesse and baguette picnic at Place des Vosges, Paris' oldest public square (and also the former home of Les Miserables writer Victor Hugo). We were to get off the metro, find all the necessary ingredients and make our way towards what was supposedly a couple's paradise. When we got off at our stop though, signs for the park were noticably absent, and neither of our maps displayed our particular street. Focused on the food-to-be, I told her we would eventually find Vosges and that we should get the food in the meantime.

Finding the wine was simple. We walked into a local supermarket, picked out an award-winning French wine for 3.50 euro, bought some plastic cups (we wanted to class it up a bit) and continued to walk down the street.

We then happened upon a bakery. Now the baguette was off our To Do List.

We kept walking, looking for cheese. Along the walk though, we realized a bottle of wine is more or less useless without a corkscrew. We came across a number of different stores and ventured in, but supermarkets, wine stores, restaurants and cafes all came up, er...dry. And still no cheese stores! As we began to get a little nervous about the prospects of our late afternoon meal, we walked past a deli which was roasting chicken on the street. I began to walk back, and I guess I had that look in my eye because Kelby asked if I wanted to add chicken to our menu. My response consisted of a coy smile and a nod. Buying the chicken was exciting, but I felt like we were still stuck in neutral without our corkscrew or cheese. On we marched.

We crossed paths with a guy holding a sausage from a butcher's shop, when all of a sudden, a guy from the butcher shop came running after him...to give him a napkin. Kelby kept on walking, but I stopped. If these guys were willing to go out of their way just to give an already-paid customer a napkin, what's to say they wouldn't open our wine for us? (I should mention at this point that asking favors in French is quite an arduous task. I know roughly three words of the language - none of which is "corkscrew" - and I wasn't exactly sure how to act out "corkscrew". It was times like these I wished Justin or Carol was with me.) Anyway, I walked into the back of the butcher's shop and made a bottle-opening gesture to the guy behind the counter. At first, he was confused. Then he got it. And he smiled. And he reached for my wine! He went to the backroom for a few seconds and reappeared with the prettiest bottle of wine I had seen in ages. With my head up high and a smile across my face, I walked triumphantly back to Kelby on the street.

At this point, I argued with myself that cheese is overrated, and that the dairy product is simply superfluous for a picnic. Then Kelby pointed it out. After walking down the same street for what seemed kilometers (or miles, for you people back home), we found our cheese store. Our excitement quickly morphed into frustration and confusion though, because again, we didn't know what kind of cheese we were looking for....or how to ask for it. With only so many options at our disposal, we each picked out a cheese that was of similar size to what we were looking for (FYI, we later learned that the cheese I picked out was superior to her's). We finally had our ingredients. But we still needed to find our eating spot.

We walked out of the cheese store and continued walking down the street. Roughly seven seconds later, we saw a sign for Place des Vosges. We stopped for a second and just laughed at our marvelous luck. Not only had we been walking the right way the entire time, but it was as if our route was built for our picnic. We walked into the park and found a bench that had at least a moderate amount of sun. I took out the wine and poured each of us a glass. We toasted to our meal, and took a sip.

What happened next falls under the "You Can't Make These Things Up" Category.

It began to rain. Then it began to hail. Hard. We immediately grabbed our food, bottled our wine and made our way for cover. After a few agonizing minutes of deliberating what to do, we agreed that the best idea was to hold the picnic....at you guessed it, the Hotel Montana.