Sunday, September 14, 2014

I’m off!

If you want to follow my travels around the Île-de-France download the 9MB Transilien map .

The map allows you greater control (I think) in your computer’s image viewer.

FYI the Transilien network is about 135 kilometres N-S and E-W. Wherever you are, imagine a circle about 65 Kilometres radius centered on you, and a 5-zone ticket that lets you travel on bus, subway, tram, regional and mainline trains.

The same area centered on a semi-circle (since Lake Ontario inhibits a full circle) would see you travelling from London in the West, Hunstville in the North, and Belleville in the East.

I am awake early, four o’clock, so excited I know I will not go back to sleep. I rise and fry an onion and toss in the remaining four eggs from the ‘fridge; a protein-laced “last breakfast”; gorged, I can hardly waddle through the apartment, but I make my bed, smooth the plain purple sheet, and begin to assemble my packing list.

There is a slight tremor as I work through my packing list. I reach the item “Notify/Pay up credit cards” and dutifully phone the company to advise them that I might be using the card outside Toronto – an aberration that their computers are sure to flag. Dialing the number gets me the news that the office is closed and I should call back during regular business hours. Doh! So I press “1 – lost or stolen card” hoping that pressing “1” won’t automatically invalidate the card; who knows, their computers might be smart enough.

I reach an operator and explain my problem – that the office is closed until after I’ve left and sure enough the operator can read her script and tells me that the solution is to phone back when the office is open. We play problem-solution tag for three volleys and then I manage to persuade her to find a pencil and a piece of paper and take a note, which she does.

We part on the best of terms and I contemplate reverting to prayer; it is, after all, Sunday morning.

I have my list of wrap-up things, which includes carrying out the garbage, closing the windows, watering the plants, turning off lights and – extracting batteries from devices I won’t be using for two weeks, devices such as the blood-pressure cuff, and just as I think of taking the battery out of the cell phone (which I won’t take because (a) who would I phone and (b) who knows what these evil companies would do to ring up “roaming charges”) it dawns on me to experiment.

I open up the cell phone, extract the SIM card, and discover that I can listen to the radio on the sim-less phone and as well can swap the 8GB chip from my old cell-phone – which I use as a podcast player – into the real cell phone sans sim as I will be saying in a few hours, so that when I flat the battery on the old phone I can get a few more hours of podcasts on the new phone. Yippee-ay-oh!

By 8am everything I plan to take, excepting the juke box, is on my bed ready to be stuffed into the bag. Twelve hours from now I ought to be at the airport.