Paris 8e

I just got home from yet another exciting trip to France.  Voila.  I noticed this time that the French seem to use that word a lot.  It’s one of those all purpose words.  I like it and think I will use it.  I have driven about 1700 km since Thursday.  I drove out to Paris last Thursday evening.   I left DA at five, but didn’t end up finding my hotel until around midnight.  I was lost for about an hour in Le Blanc Mesnil until I found the crappy hotel.

Friday morning I went to Charles de Gaul airport to pick up Ken, who had flown in from Detroit.  I’m not really sure why they had him come all the way here…I did most of the work, and the driving.  We drove from the airport to Renault in Lardy.  We were kind of late getting there, but it worked out ok.  We met a group of people from DA that were about to drive all the way back.  We got checked in and unloaded all the tools I had brought with me.  Ken had the new flange with him in his luggage.  I began to stone the damaged shaft while Ken was cornered and interrogated by three guys from Renault.  I felt bad for him, because they weren’t being very fair with him.  He was earning his trip to Paris.  I had never actually done exactly what they wanted me to do before, but I had a good idea and plenty of advice on how to do it.  I was worried that I would fail.  We worked until about 7pm that night and then drove to Dourdan, where our hotel was located.

Dourdan turned out to be quite an interesting little town.  Our hotel was located right behind the church which was right next to the castle.  In front of all that was a very old market place.  We ate dinner at a restaurant up a side street somewhere.  We did the three course meal.  I had the salad with foix gras, smoked ham, and either sautéed chicken kidneys or livers.  I’m not sure what I was eating but it tasted damned good.  For the main course I had the filet mignon with scalloped potatoes, and for desert crème broulet.  It was all very good, especially with the half litre of Bordeaux I ordered.  When we left the hotel the next morning the market square was abuzz with shopping excitement.  We made to Lardy to meet Richard.

We did some last minute things before trying to assemble the tooling to the new flange.  I felt it was as good as it was going to get, so I sat down with the tooling and the new flange.  The flange has an asymmetrical hole pattern in it to prevent parts from being assembled to it in the incorrect orientation.  I tried to line up the plate with the holes and wasn’t able to.  Ken tried and failed also.  We tried some adapters that we knew worked before and those didn’t line up either.  The hole pattern was wrong.  I felt like throwing the flange across the parking lot.  We were stopped dead in our tracks.  Come to find out later, the inspection report caught the incorrect hole pattern, but approved the part just the same.  What were we to do?  We decided to have the flange modified since there was still room to add another pattern.  But we would have to wait until Monday to use a shop that my company’s French office uses.

We left and drove into Paris to our hotel, Rochambeau.  Paris is wonderful, even when it is cold and rainy.  That’s all I have the energy to write for now, I will try to finish the story of my travels tomorrow.