Why does it always take so long to get ready for a trip? A million chores have to be completed in the 24 hours preceding departure.
Audi didn’t manage to find the problem with the wing mirrors not folding in or out. They can’t have looked very hard, though, because my trusty laptop and magic cable took just a couple of minutes to determine that there is an intermittent “short to ground” in the mirror motors of both the driver and passenger doors. Of course, Audi’s bill for their trouble, which arrived today, includes a labour charge for time spent investigating the problem. Right. I don’t think so. I’ll have to get that sorted out when we get back.
I’ve just burned a pile of CDs to keep Eloïse amused in the car. We considered giving her her own digital music player, but I don’t like the idea of isolating family members behind a set of headphones. I’d rather pay the price of having to listen to her music while I drive than lose the ability to talk to her about the trip ahead and the things we see passing by the window.
I realise now that I never blogged about my impressions of Disneyland in Paris.
Well, it struck me as a rather surreal form of concentration camp, in which victims of commercial indoctrination voluntarily incarcerate themselves for multiple days at a time. Hard labour in the form of endless queueing is then the order of the day, sustained by a shamefully poor diet whose caloric content is inversely proportional to its nutritional value.
In short, Disneyland is best enjoyed if you find yourself gently hovering somewhere between the predicates ‘moron’ and ‘idiot’. If you have a double digit IQ or a single digit age, Disneyland is the place for you; as long as you have a quadruple digit budget, that is.
The worst cases, the irretrievably insane, can be easily spotted: they are the ones unaccompanied by children. What these people are doing there is anybody’s guess.
As I probably wrote at the time, though, Eloïse had a great time, although even she was saying that she wanted to go home on the last day. She even rode the Tower of Terror a couple of times, a ride that had grown men screaming.
We have a five hour drive ahead of us tomorrow to Kiel in Germany. It might not sound like much, but it’s long enough with a baby in the car. Speaking of Lucas, we bought him a pair of sunglasses today, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll be prepared to leave them on.