I was leaving Jan. 13 and had a few things left to pick up at MEC in Toronto first, so Jen was going to drop me off at the bus station at 10:30 even though my flight was at 5:30. The funny thing was that as we were trying to leave the house to catch that bus, we realized her car was boxed in by Natalie's behind, Matt's in front and the Glenco station wagon on the side. Because none of these car owners were around to move their vehicles, and after trying various impossible escape manuvers for a few minutes (think Austin Powers) I popped the Neon into neutral and me and Jen pushed in through the snow far enough up to allow us to back the car out to freedom!

Anyway, all was well from then on. I got my new backpack properly adjusted at M.E.C. Toronto (which involved exchanging it for the right size!) and picked up some other stuff there, then took the TTC to the airport. For some reason my return flight from Paris is direct to Pearson, but on the way there I had to fly through Montreal. By 10AM the next morning I was at Paris CDG.

I plan on seeing Paris with whatever slack time I have left on the way back, so I took the train directly from the airport to ... well at this point I still hadn't decided exactly where I wanted to go first, so I just took the next train leaving which was to Nice, all the way in the south of France. The TGV is supposed to cost extra on top of your Eurorail pass, but this reservation fee turned out to be only 3 Euros. The train was super fast until we got to about Marseille and started stopping all the time. In total it took about 6 hours.

Nice is pretty great so far, but I'm basing that mostly on the weather. It feels like San Francisco in the winter.