Beaune to Paris -

Another sunny day!

We went to a fabulous and beautiful open air market in Beaune city center.  The array of vegetables, spices, olives, fruits, pates etc. was incredibly beautiful.  It definitely made us want to stay and have a kitchen in which to cook!  We did buy some pears, a baguette, some lovely cheese and some pate to eat later.  We also bought two necklaces of Murano glass, one for me and one for Jecca's birthday.

We changed some money at the Post Office and....I left my driver's license there.  They called the hotel and we had to go back to the city quickly before they closed at noon.  Ah - getting old and being forgetful.  In addition, we found that we had left our hotel room completely unlocked yesterday evening when we went out.  Sigh.

We went to a beautiful little park just outside of Beaune and had a great picnic in a pastoral setting with a lot of ducks and swans.  Idyllic.

As we did not have a long way to go to Paris, we took backroads for about half the distance.  At Auxerre, we hopped back on the highway and made our way to Paris.  We checked into the fully-booked Formule #1 and then drove to a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner, in a reminiscent nod to our first trip to Paris in 1982 when we ate at a lot of Vietnamese restaurants.  Then, we somewhat sadly, dropped off our car and walked back to the hotel.

The Formula #1 is huge - six stories high.  We were disappointed that the toilets/showers were not very clean.  For those who don't know what a Formula #1 is:  it is an automated, barebones hotel. All the rooms have a bolted frame bed - double below, single bunk.  There is a bolted in desk and a sink.  That's about it.  In the past we stayed at fairly small ones and had never booked into one so large. But, it is still cheap - 41 Euros.  We paid a bit extra for breakfast. The breakfast turned out to be great, though.  Bottomless cups of coffee, unlimited bagettes, cereal etc.