The weekend

I'm exhausted, but here's what happened the last couple of days:

We got up Friday morning at 5:00am and left to catch the train to St. Pierre des Corps in the Loire Valley. On the way down the stairs, Mom fell hard and hurt her foot/ankle really bad. She almost didn't go, but decided she could try. Poor thing, her foot is absolutely huge, swollen and purple. She doesn't think it is broken, but it is sprained at the least. It looks really awful. We raced off to catch our train and BARELY made it! We jumped on just before the doors closed and off we went. As we were sitting in our chairs resting and thinking how lucky we were to catch our train, Paige puked all over me and herself. I hadn't brought a change of clothes so I stood in the tiny bathroom (think airplane small, but dirtier) and washed my dress and Paige's clothes and managed to dump water all over the floor. We finally go to St. Pierre, rented a car and headed out. We went to Chambord and then shopping in one Loches. We then went to our hotel which was actually a castle... le Chateau du Razay. It was beautiful and the lady who owned the place was so very sweet! We had an incredible room with a canopy bed and two smaller beds. We got up this morning and headed out to see the castle Chenenceau. It was beautiful. Even more beautiful than I had imagined. Then we headed back to the train station thinking we had a lot of time to kill. We sat around.. looked in the store, had some coffee... At 6:10 I thought I should check our train number and upon closer inspection of the ticket, I realized that I had read 17:50 (5:50) as 6:50! I looked on the board and it said our train was 20 minutes late (YAY!!) So, we RAN to the platform and the lady said we could not get on because the doors were closed and just as she said that, it pulled away. I wanted to cry. Never fear, though! I went down to ticketing and after a really long wait, I got tickets on the next train that was less than an hour away and I didn't even have to pay to change the tickets. This time, we got on without a problem and headed home. The kids fell asleep on the train, so Mom and I had to carry them and they woke up just as we got to the last subway stop. After we got back to our apartment, Jeff and I went out by ourselves to the Arc du Triomphe only to find that the lady who sells the tickets to take the elevator to the top decided that she could close 15 minutes early so we just missed. Of course, she didn't care. :) We will have to go back another day. We walked down Champs Elysees where I was able to replace my sunglasses (oh yea, I lost my Ray Bans on the metro! I bet someone is the proud new owner of my sunglasses.) and then we came back home. It was a very exciting two days. A lot of fun though! :)
Good night.