After four days in the area around Cousin Marion’s home in the foothills of the Pyrénées Mountains – officially the Midi-Pyrénées area –  we drove to Bordeaux to catch the train to Paris. After the rural towns where we have spent the last several days, Bordeaux just seems big and dirty. We did have a terrific dinner in a small restaurant that was much more modern than the restaurants where we have been eating. The next morning, we caught a quick breakfast and then dropped the car off near the railroad station – Gare de Bordeaux-Saint-Jean – just as it started to rain. As an aside, dropping a car off at the rental agency, near a railroad station in a strange city, in a rainstorm, is a major ordeal. End aside. We ended the day in Paris – the first time I have ever been there, although I did go through Paris on the Orient Express many years ago – at Cousin Claude’s home, where we watched Hamilton qualify on the pole in a rainstorm, at the Hungaroring in Budapest (on Michele’s laptop which was playing the recording on our VCR at home!).