departure is still ahead

After drawing up the tentative itinerary (and after some ten days of not even flipping the pages of the guide) comes the daunting task of figuring out which train to take and which hotel to unlace our shoes at. Internet comes in handy, but it can also be a curse. As for trains, the SNCF, which covers the entire France by rail, has one of the most user-unfriendly web site that demands you to fill out a form after another, clicking the same damned button again and again, before finally finding the right train for you, almost by chance. But probably we should be grateful, rather than hateful, for their kindness to have actually put up an English version of their booking system. When it comes to booking a hotel, a perfectionist will never come out of the process alive. France is a country of tourism, among many other things, of course. Therefore it has an astronomical number of hotels, either excellent, good, mediocre, or to avoid at any cost. In this internet era, it seems almost criminal to pick one randomly from the recommended hotels listed in the guide you have. You feel obliged to exploit the thousands of comments posted on tens of trip advising sites concerning how wonderful or disastrous your predecessors' stay in a particular hotel. Once you have made up your mind on one, after days of tiresome research, it may turn out that the hotel doesn't have a vacancy on the desired date. Or it might have one luxurious room looking down the Mediterranean that you don't even dream of affording. Or it might not be reachable via the internet, which entails some dozen trials of sending an international fax or hours of waiting on hold for some French travel agency only through which reservation is available. The treat here is the painfully cute English with French accent the girl at the reservation center speaks with the ends of every other word jumping up like a startled hummingbird. Anyway, you have reserved the hotels and the critical trains for your trip. Congratulations. Making arrangement with your family and friends for your cat to be sat and fed, finishing the college applications you've been working on (as much as you can), packing, running a last-minute errand for a toothpaste, they all seem trivial compared to what you have done now. You're ready for the flight at last.

And so began our journey.