I think I’m finished with my posts about my visit to England but I may post a few more photos. It was such a great trip. I came back to Paris on a Saturday for our move to our new apartment on Monday.(Let me just add that the trip was planned long before the move. As Murphy’s Law would have it, the move fell at the same time.) Maurice had done some packing but he was suffering from back pain and wasn’t able to do much. So I packed like a mad woman even putting the coffee maker in a box which Maurice discovered when he went to make his coffee the next morning. The men arrived and quickly got everything downstairs and into a truck. They didn’t use one of those machines that move things from a window down to the street thus saving us money-poor guys. They seemed to be okay with it anyway (The owner of the business was the one who decided not to use the machine, not us). Then we raced over to the new apartment where at least there could use the elevator for smaller things, tiny though it is. Boxes were stacked all over the place in our new apartment but really, it seemed to go very quickly.

So goodbye number 4. It’s been a great nine years.

Goodbye living room that we enlarged two years ago by knocking out a wall.

Goodbye kitchen. I really liked how it was set up and will miss the great dishwasher. The blue thing to the right is our air conditioning unit. The new owner bought it from us. I was sort of glad as it takes up a lot of room but I sure did miss it as Paris got very hot after we moved. We have good cross ventilation when we open the windows and a fan helps but still. We aren’t in Paris much in the summer right now so maybe it won’t matter.

Goodbye stairs. I won’t miss lugging groceries or suitcases up these. It got to be hard although good exercise. We got so we had groceries delivered and the delivery guy couldn’t believe we didn’t have an elevator. He informed us that all of the other buildings in the area did. What are you going to do? In our case, move.

The boxes piled up and waiting at our new place. I’ll show you a bit of it in the next posting. We only had a few days to unpack as a friend was arriving but we managed. I unpacked 32 boxes in two days. I’m still not sure where everything is.
The day everything was moved out of our old place, I did a finally cleaning, making sure the bathroom was all sparkling clean and vacuuming and then mopping the floors. I took the bus over to our new apartment with a mop sticking out of my little grocery cart on wheels. The next day, somehow, I managed to get our vacuum cleaner into the cart. Maurice, who couldn’t walk well because of his back pain but could ride a bike, offered to take it in the basket of the bike. I would love to have seen that-the body of the vacuum stuck in the basket, the hose wound around his neck like a boa. However, when the time came, it slid into my cart like a hand into a glove. The hose sort of slid in too and just the handle stuck up over the edge. I got a few looks on the bus. I’m sure everyone thought I was with some sort of cleaning company but I managed to move it pretty easily. I thought I was completely done when the guy who bought our old place called to inform us that I had left some clothes in the built-in dirty clothes hamper. Sigh. So one more trip back up those stairs with my cart to get the final load. I’m so glad I won’t have to take that bus back and forth anymore.