Paris on my Mind
When I told colleagues I was going to London and Paris, most lit up at some warm memory of strolling along St Germain de Pres, sitting in some café on some random corner sipping wildly expensive coffee or a glass of wine, eating some fabulous meal, or taking in the sights and art of the City of Lights. London just doesn’t generate the same veneration.
Paris was ground zero for my trip to Europe. I was scheduled to give two workshops two times each at the SAMA (Strategic Account Management Association) European Congress at the Hotel le Meridienne, conveniently located just near Garre Montparnasse in the historic old district.
Being the seasoned traveler that I am, I paid about zero attention to the details involved with getting to our hotel other than to arrange to take the Eurostar from Waterloo Station in London to Garre du Nord in Paris on the Saturday before the Monday I was to speak. How hard could it be? I’ve been to Paris many times, love the Metro, know
how to read a map, and have drilled into my children’s imagination Kevin’s first rule of travel: find the train station and go from there. In any city in any country other than the one I live in, everything ties in some way back to the train station. So how hard could it be?
The problem with that logic is that it works great in Zurich, Amsterdam, and any one of a hundred small and midsized cities you could name. It’s less certain in Paris and London where there are many very large train stations. In the case of Paris, Gare du Nord is on one side of town and Gare Montparnasse is on the other. No problem, get out the map, guess at where the hotel was (now you can see the problem), and find a metro line that gets you close. So far so good.
I actually knew the name of the street the hotel was on and by comparing three maps I could tell it was near the big station in Montparnasse. That was the easy part. The hard part was that I didn’t know exactly where on the street the hotel was. And yes, if you saw this coming, the station is immense and depending on where you come out,
