No trip of mine would be complete, of course, without some sort of drama occurring. You see, for some reason when I was in Japan planning my European travel itinerary, when it came to getting from Berlin down to Paris, for some reason the fact that I would be attempting to travel to the most visited city on Earth only three days before New Year's Eve 2000 somehow never phased me. I never gave a second thought to the reality that everybody and their grandmother would be trying to get to Paris either via plane, train, automobile, or foot and that perhaps I should have made a seat reservation for the train eons ago. As the Frenchies say, "C'est la vie!" ("That's life!"). On the 28th, Gesine and I arrived at the train station sometime around noon so that I would have "plenty of time" (or so I thought) to arrange transport to Paris. I suppose that since I had first class train tickets across Europe that there would be plenty of seats available since first class is never full. But again, I completely forgot about this whole New Year's Eve 2000 in Paris thing and upon arriving at the Deutsche Bahn service counter at the Berlin station and confidently requesting an overnight train ticket from Berlin to Paris, the friendly woman assisting us just started to grin, as if to say, "You want to go where??? When??? Bwahahahaha!!!" When she began to speak she kindly informed me that there was ABSOLUTELY NO WAY IN HELL my sorry little self was going to be in Paris before New Year's Day unless I already had a seat reservation in hand since all trains departing Berlin via Wherever to Paris were reservation-only and had been booked out ages ago. Now, if there is one thing I learned in childhood, it is that if you go to one parent who says "NO!" just harp on them for a while or go to the other parent and restate the question slightly differently until you finally get a "YES!" The modus operandi of the "real world" is absolutely no different than that of childhood, so when I heard the response, "You ain't gonna be in Paris tomorrow, no way, no how!" I decided to take matters into my own hands. My stipulations for getting to Paris were rather simple and straight forward: I didn't care how I got there, as long as I traveled through Germany, Switzerland, Italy and/or France (since those were the countries in which my EuroRail train pass was valid) and I needed to be in Paris before 9 a.m. the next morning to meet my sister at Charles de Gaul Airport. Eventually the customer service woman came up with a very short list of possibilities for me to get from Berlin to Paris, none of which met any of the criteria stated above. The only viable schedule had me going from Berlin via Hamburg, Amsterdam and Brussels eventually arriving in Paris late in the afternoon the next day. This was, of course, no good since my train ticket wasn't valid in any of those countries and it would have cost me about $100, and I most likely couldn't get a seat reservation the whole way through which meant I might be ejected into the train aisle should someone with a reservation claim their seat. I was getting a bit desperate at this point and Gesine and I discussed whether or not I should buy the ticket, at which time I just suggested to the lady: I don't need to be on a direct Berlin-Paris night train. Why not just get me a series of connections all over Germany, coming into Paris from the east and not the busy corridors to the north, and see if you can't get a place for me on the NiteLine two-story hotel train from Hamburg to Basel, Switzerland and I can just change trains in Karlsruhe in southern Germany at 5 a.m. and catch any connecting trains via Strasbourg to Paris??? Lo and behold, she looked in her computer, and it worked! There were available connections all the way through! And, fortunately for me, I could score my own ritzy little sleeping car bed on the NiteLine train from Hamburg to Karlsruhe and sleep in my own little compartment doors locked as well as get some rest in preparation for my big day in Paris! At a price of DM 85 ($50), I considered it a steal! The only downsides were that I wouldn't arrive in Paris until noon, and I would have to sit in the smoking section. Oh well, I suppose there are worse fates than breathing in second hand smoke for a couple hours - like, maybe, working in a coal mine, so I decided to just get over it. The important thing was that I got my connections to Paris and I was on my way! As per the above mentioned story, I jumped on my Hamburg bound train around 8:30pm, changed trains in Hamburg at 11:30, settled into my little hotel room on the bottom floor of the two level hotel train and awoke in Karlsruhe the next morning and changed trains to the Strasburg line in France, and rode for another 4 hours into Paris. Due to the Storm of the Millennium which had struck just days before, there were numerous delays on the Strasburg-Paris line since the train had to slow way down while going through some of the forests along the way due to downed trees next to the tracks and nearly-flooded rail passes and bridges. Nevertheless, after arriving in Paris late and needing to figure out how to take the subway across town to Hotel Exelmans to meet my sister, I arrived perky and ready to go right at 2 p.m.! Meeting AmyLynn was pretty humorous as well since before she departed San Francisco to Paris, she and I arranged that I would meet her at de Gaul airport at 9 a.m. and we could find our hotel together. Well, that didn't work and by the time I had figured out in Berlin that I wouldn't be anywhere near Paris at 9 a.m., it was too late to get ahold of Amy since she had already left her apartment for the airport. My bad!!! Plus, before my departure to Europe, I sent this ominous little email to my sister stating something along the lines that, "If for some reason my plane crashes, my train derails, or I just die of natural causes before you arrive in Paris on the 29th, don't worry about me at all and just go out and have a great time by yourself!" (I mean, it could very easily happen!) Well, when 9 a.m., 10 a.m., and 11 a.m. rolled around at de Gaul airport and Amy was sitting there all alone thinking about my email, I think she started to have a minor freak out! : -) So, as per our "worst case scenario" plan we agreed that if by some horrible fate neither of us should be at the airport by 12 noon, whoever was left stranded would go immediately to the hotel and wait for however long it took for the other to show up. Unfortunately it was AmyLynn who was left in deep interstellar space to orbit by herself with no word of my whereabouts or well-being. So as per our plan, she went straight to the hotel. Well, as sheer luck would have it, it took her two hours to get from the air port to the hotel and it took me equally as long to get from Paris-Est train station to the hotel and we arrived in the hotel lobby within 100 seconds of one another! As a matter of fact, we both concluded that we must have been on the same subway train from downtown to the hotel!!! Just as Amy entered the lobby and asked the man behind the counter, "Have you seen a tall American man around here?" in I walk and say, "Hey Amy! Great to see you! Been here long?" Crazy! Afterwards I had asked Amy what she would have done had I not shown up in Paris at all as per the ominous email I had sent her and she replied, "I would have sat right here in the hotel room for two weeks waiting for you to arrive until my return flight departed on January 9th!" Cute! So with no time to spare, Amy and I quickly unpacked some of our things, washed up, then ran out the door to be wowed and amazed by gay Paris!