Our day on Thursday began in London where we had to be on the bus to leave the hotel at 2:45am local time. After several nights of very little sleep, I got very confused about the time change from Eastern time so when I went to sleep, I must have set my alarm clock on my blackberry wrong! Because at 3a (10p ET) while I was in a deep sleep, the phone in my room rings and a White House staffer calmly says “Hey Becky, are you going to be joining us to France?” Talk about a wake-up call!! The bus to the airport was about to leave without me!! In the six years I’ve been traveling, I have never once even come close to missing the bus and this would have been huge!! So of course I panic and tell the WH staffer than I’ll be down in a couple of minutes. Luckily, this time I was packed up and had actually dropped off my suitcase the night before. So I threw on my clothes, maybe ran my brush through my hair and made it downstairs and on the bus in 4 minutes! I didn’t even go to the bathroom!! I was the last one on the bus but luckily since it was 3am, most of my colleagues (about 170 in the traveling press corps) were asleep on the buses and didn’t recognize that I was the lone person holding things up!It took a while to get to the airport, and then we actually had to go through security! We finally made it to France in a few hours (even though the flight itself was only about an hour long!) Once we landed, it was another four hours on a bus to Deauville, the site of the G8. I took five and a half years of French in high school and college and I remember studying the French countryside. On most of the ride from Paris to Deauville, I thought the scenery looked more like Virginia or Tennessee than the pictures in my head from French class. Finally we turned off the interstate and I got to see the French countryside that I had pictured. Small cottages and fields lined the roads and every once in awhile, we’d pass a really small village. I immediately thought of one of my high school French teachers, Madame Hosp. She didn’t teach me a whole lot in the two years I had her but I think she would occasionally talk about different regions of France. Maybe it’s just because I associate all things French with her. Anyway, the last hour of the eternal bus ride was really beautiful.
As for the actual G8, there’s not a lot to report. I never saw POTUS and he was busy with meeting with other world leaders talking about global economic issues and other pressing topics on the world stage. We did a lot of liveshots from this workspace that was several miles away. It was at this racetrack place and once again, it didn’t scream France. We could have been pretty much anywhere! 
Most of what we saw in France was from this view:
I’m not positive but before it was all over, we spent about 30 hours in France and about 14 of those were in a bus or a car. On Thursday night, we were getting a ride to the hotel from the workspace which was about 1.5 hours away. I was in a car with three of my colleagues and not only did our driver get incredibly lost, he was wearing sunglasses at 11pm driving aimlessly through the French countryside. I’m sure it was beautiful but it was dark. I think we might have gone to Normandy by accident. We drove around one traffic circle four times in a row!!We finally made it to our hotel which was located near Omaha beach. I paused to think about the magnitude of what happened on those beaches more than 60 years ago. I most definitely want to come back to this region of the world and see more of it- in the daytime! The amazingly beautiful sunrise was just the perfect way to start the day!
There’s one more thing I’d like to share about my quick visit to France. Memo to self: Next time, bring your own hair dryer!! I’ve come to assume that hotels we stay in for work will have a hair dryer so I didn’t bring mine. Well, the one in the room in France was more like a vacuum cleaner. More air comes out when a one-year-old blows out the candles of a birthday cake. Let’s just say the air flow is not good. 
So this is what I looked like at the end of drying my hair. Goodness, I missed my hair dryer at that moment!!
Total time of sleep on Thursday: 5 hours
No comments:
Post a Comment