Day 52-53: Congis-sur-Thérouanne > Paris (CDG) > Dubai (DXB) > Brisbane (BNE)

No more sleeps. We go home today.

You will notice that I labelled today days 52 and 53. With 28 hours in transit and with the magic of timezones, it is hard to tell exactly where one day ends and the next starts.

And fatigue and exhaustion don’t help.

Dinner last night at Le Beau Rivage was delicious. The food was amazing, the service was great, and the setting was spectacular.

And the company was pretty darn good too.

We woke in Congis-sur-Thérouanne for our very last morning in France. You have probably guessed from previous days, but I’m a bit in love with Congis-sur-Thérouanne. Such a pretty commune (villiage) and so much like the “France” that I was looking forward to enjoying.

MBW and I might be a lot of things, but we are creatures of habit.

We woke, had ablutions, got dressed, and went for a walk down to our “local” (boulangerie) to use up the remains of our euros. And buy breakfast.

We decided to go hard or go home, and as we are already going home, we decided to go hard also. You may think that 4 croissants between us is too many, and so we limited ourselves to just two croissants.

Plus I had a brioche bun with chocolate bits in it, and MBW had a pain au chocolate (croissant with chocolate in it).

We walked back the 700m or so to our AirBNB, made coffee, and had the last breakfast.

We’d finished most of our packing, and just needed to throw in the last few things ready for the trip home. We gave the AirBNB a quick clean, loaded up Robèrt, and messaged Gerard and Patricia that we would be leaving at 10.00am.

In response to our message, Gerard (followed by Patricia) wandered over and said hello. It was nice to meet them.

I gifted those snow chains to Gerard, so if you were hoping to get them from me as a gift then I’m afraid that horse has bolted. There was no point bringing them home.

We’ve only got two jobs remaining – get to the airport to drop off Claude’s remaining key, and get Robèrt back to the rental car office without damaging him.

It was about a 45 minute trip back to CDG, and we achieved that with boring uneventfullness. Gave him a top-up and then had about 3 attempts to follow Joséphine’s directions back to the rental car drop-off. The signage is confusing … actually inaccurate is probably a better word, because the lane under the “rental cars” sign didn’t take you to the rental car area.

So we made several loops of the airport before somehow finding the lane that took us where we wanted to go. I’m still not entirely sure how we achieved that, and suggest it was more good luck that good management.

Dropped off Robèrt, unloaded our luggage, and found our way to the terminal.

We tried to print our bag labels, but the machine said that there was a problem with our booking and we needed to speak to a check-in agent. It turns out there was nothing wrong with our booking and we breezed through.

We have heard some horror stories of overweight carry-on luggage and issues with the luggage police, so we kept our carry-on stuff under the limit. We have also heard horror stories about long check-in processes, long queues at security along with disinterested security guards. and broken scanning equipment.

But everything was fine and there was no need to be concerned. We were through security and at the gate in record time and we waited for our Emirates flight.

The flight home was a reverse of the flight over – a 7 hour flight from CDG to DXB, a brief wait, then a 14 hour flight from DXB to BNE.

Despite landing at DXB at 2.30am local time, we didn’t bother to try and sleep, but once we were on the second (longer) flight, we were served dinner (or maybe it was breakfast …?), and settled in for sleep. MBW probably got about 4-5 hours, and I got a bit less. I actually didn’t think that I had slept at all, but when I “woke” I learned that MBW had been offered and accepted a mini-pizza and drink, and not only did I miss out, but I have no recollection of it coming around.

We had a miserable flight attendant on our first flight, but that was offset by a lovely Greek lady on the second one who took the time to hand-write some notes on her favourite places to see if ever we make it to Greece.

We landed in Brisbane around 10.30pm as planned, got off quickly, got our bags relatively quickly, then made our way through customs, immigration and Border Security … again all very uneventful.

Zach (#Son5) had offered to pick us up, and sure enough he was there waiting for us at customer pickup.

We finally got to bed just after midnight, and it was nice sleeping in our own bed. We slept until 8.30am (and woke to the alarm), and I’m pleased to report that I lost almost 2 kilograms in the 7½ weeks that we were away, despite eating too many croissants and baguettes every day … but I’m not saying any more about that topic.

Shhh!

We had a wonderful trip, and it was nice to create those memories with MBW, although – in hindsight – almost 8 weeks was probably a bit long.

Next time I would take shoes that are far more waterproof that the ones we took, as our shoes (and socks, and feet) were often wet when it rained, plus I’d take a backpack that is genuinely waterproof. When you get stuck in heavy rain with a small, folding unbrella, everything in a cheap backpack gets wet.

It’s been a blast!

I think I’d like to do France again sometime. The food, people and geography are amazing. And the food – that’s amazing too 🙂 I do love my croissants and baguettes. We are going to have to find quality croissants here in Brisbane, because I don’t think that the ones from Woolies are going to meet the grade any longer.

Ciao

#Europe2025