Paris: Leaving that Awesome Place

After a long hiatus... here is the last of my posts about Paris.

And so all too quickly our week in Paris came to a close.  We stayed, all 13 of us, in the lovely Loft Isabelle just outside of Paris proper, but for all intents and purposes still in the city.

It was a former mechanic shop converted into this lovely space with full skylights.  Very different from most of the flats we looked at, especially to accommodate our large group.  In the above picture I'm standing just outside the room that we had.  My back would be to the street and the place was roughly a rectangle.

Along the right wall below were two areas for seating and a garage (which you can't really see).  Along the left wall below was a bathroom/dressing room and then a bedroom, an open space with a little patio open to outside, and then in the far corner one more bedroom by itself.  (yes, there is a tree inside too!)

Upstairs on the right (left in the above photo) was all open area with some weights.  The "back" wall was the wall to our room and we faced out onto the street.  The left had a large bathroom with a hallway to one side (that you are looking into on the right side of this photo) that went into a dressing room (where the boys stayed) then across a little sky bridge (which I'm standing on) and into the last bedroom.

So there were 5 full bedrooms, 3 very large nice bathrooms, and lots of open space.  There was a (very) small kitchen under our room with the afore mentioned industrial stove and oven, but we made it work!  Dominque came in every day and provided our breakfast, which was lovely.  We made many short trips around the corner to the Monoprix and I wished I'd had my camera when I went to the corner fruit/veggie stand! 

The space was a little cold, but not unbearable and the floors were heated in a lot of the main floor so that helped.  There was also a small basement with laundry that we convinced them to let us use!  And one evening Dominique and his aunt were down there doing some laundry and I heard voices so I went to see and ended up having a fascinating conversation with them.  They were from Mauritius, but his aunt had lived in Paris for many years, mainly as a nanny.  They both spoke their native language as well as French and English.  So impressive and humbling.

Dominique took this photo of all of us as we were leaving Sunday morning.  The window directly above us was to our bathroom and the ones to the right were to the bedroom.  You can see more photos of the interior space if you visit the website, but hopefully my explanations help with the floor plan.  I never did figure it out until we got there!

And then we parted ways with the rest of our family as they were heading out into the countryside for a few days and we were going on home.  The kids are all chillin' in the airport with snacks!  For the most part the Charles de Gaulle airport redeemed itself to me, compared to our last crazy layover there!

Because we had paid for 5 seats only on the way home someone was going to end up sitting with one adult and two children.  The flight attendants managed to find that hapless person a seat elsewhere for both of our legs so I had Joy and Noah with me in a whole row.  Joy was loving her own seat!  World traveler here we come!

Cory once again did not sleep for the entire return trip.  We once again did not pack enough diapers in our carry on and were down to none by the time we got our luggage back in Seattle, plus the girls had peed through so we had various wet shirts, Ergos, and I'm not sure they had dry pants on until we got out either.  Note to self for next time.  You can never have too many diapers on a plane!

But we made it home, with all of our luggage, and I even met a new friend on the plane because I spotted her daughter wearing a unique dress!

Paris, someday we'll go back!