I made the most of having a row to myself on the Paris-bound flight by stretching out and getting a good 8 hours horizontal sleep on the 12 hour trip, arriving there at 0730h fairly refreshed. The arrival formalities were much more relaxed than at Singapore, with everyone just wandering around trying to find their way to the customs clearance area. Eventually we got to an area with three cordoned pathways labelled with red, orange and green circles. At first, I wondered what that meant, until I realised (or hoped) that it probably referred to the country you had arrived from in terms of COVID status. Since Australia was classified as a Green Code country, I followed the Green circle and soon joined the end of a long queue to a Passport Control gate. By chance I joined just behind an Australian guy I had met in a queue in Singapore, so we struck up a conversation again to occupy ourselves as we snaked towards the exit. As we neared the front of the queue, we realised that we were headed toward the EU Passport Control gate, and hoped we hadn't wasted a lot of time in the wrong queue. But no one else seemed to be getting rejected at the front of the queue, so we figured we couldn't be the only Australians in the queue, and just stayed in line. When it came our turn to be processed, the officer took no notice of all the forms we had filled in on the plane or brought from Australia. He just scanned our passport, stamped it, and bid us farewell (all in less that 10 seconds). We then made our way to the baggage carousel (all located in a new, larger area than on my last trip through Paris-CDG) and our bags arrived within 5 seconds. All good so far.

From then on it was all very straight-forward, waiting for the platform number of my TGV train to be posted 20 minutes before departure time, then finding the correct platform and the position of my carriage using the Train Configuration display board. When I got on-board, however, I couldn't find my allocated seat number. I had seat 17 but all the seats in the carriage seemed to be numbered between 40 and 80! After a very mild panic, I realised that there was another very small (8 seat) compartment on the other side of the entrance door. So I then settled in for the ride to Lorraine. As we sped along, I check emails from the previous 36 hours and found one from Angela, a long-time reader of this blog and future bargee, who wrote "Fantastic to read you are on your way and got out of Victoria just in time. All the best for the repairs and the travels. I will be reading with interest." So, Angela, wherever you may be, thanks for your message. It's nice to hear of people who enjoy reading the blog, and I hope your transition from "future bargee" to "current bargee" won't be too far in the future.

After dinner, we settled down to watch a little TV in the games room, and were shocked to see some of the damage done just to the north of us in Germany by the flooding in recent days. It was gruesome to see some of the damage wrought, as typified by the photo below. The torrential rain has been widespread across Germany, France and Switzerland, and as we were to learn later might have significant consequences for us with respect to our planned cruising for the season. But that was of little consequence when compared to the 100-plus deaths overnight in Germany.