As you may have noticed from previous entries, over the past three weeks I have been almost constantly travelling, with various but mostly large amounts of luck in my travels.
Starting with a Paris-Marseille round trip for our daughter birthday, where both trains ran on time with operational WiFi and Air conditioning (and the inevitable noisy junior passengers commuting back from their vacations).
Followed a few hours later by a Paris-Lugano round trip where again the stars aligned since the flight to Milano Malpensa was on time and landed 20mn before the only direct (flexi)bus to Lugano departed. Again in time. On the way back I had to leave right after my talk (apologies!) but got a direct (if slow) train to Milano and hopped the push via Montenapoleone (!) between two Milano metro lines to reach Milano Linate with one hour to go. On time again.
One day at home to sort various pump issues (from fixing all car injectors to replacing a drainage pump that failed to stop a massive rainstorm from entering our basement, to a flat bike tyre returning from PariSanté Campus) and then a quick weekend drive to Argentan, Normandy, for which the car managed and the traffic was surprisingly smooth for the last weekend of the national August vacation break), and where I enjoyed a long run in the woody hills, one month or so prior to the Argentan half-marathon, 30 years from my first participation. Enough time back home to cook a fresh, Norman, rhubarb preserve and off to to Durham, Northumbria, by another smooth, on-time, flight, with the small hitch of the RER B—just back from being closed for an entire month—unexpectedly finishing one station too early (and a particularly noisy family returning from one amusement park). And the same on the return, via Newcastle with a glimpse from the train of the Tyne and its iconic bridge. Reminding me of my visit there for the RSS meeting in 2013, travelling with Jim Hobert.
One more day at home and at work (teaching my first Monte Carlo class of the semester) and I was back in Charles de Gaulle airport for the flight to Tokyo Haneda. With enough time to have a second breakfast in the lounge and leave my phone on my seat!, fortunately recovered a few frantic minutes later. The flight took one hour less than expected, thanks to favourable winds, with the hitches of having no AC power plug available on the plane and no Wifi on either phone or laptop, a nuisance on a 12h day flight with a talk to polish. Going through customs at Haneda was even smoother than “usual” and I only took one wrong train on my way to Yokohama. (Which happened again the next days until I decided to stick Google map schedules, which are highly accurate and constantly updated). The only hitch of the trip was the attempt at bullet summiting Fuji-san, unsurprisingly as with most of my bullet attempts!, because the weather conditions were horrendous to the point of wardens turning people off at the entry of the Yoshida path and also to the point of inducing landslides on the unique route conducting to the 5th station. I thus got stuck there with 1600 people for a few hours until the route was reopened and the shuttle restarted, obviously with some further delays in entering the (third) bus, with more confusion and jostling than usual in Japan (but also with a large proportion of foreign hikers!). Taxis were not responding either and before the news came of the reopening I was getting worried about missing my flight! While the return saw no seamless connections and no express trains, leading to a total trip time close to 5 hours, incl. a cold soba stop at a station, I still managed to reach my Haneda hotel at check-in time and to have an intense training session on their treadmill to make up for the missing 15km and 1400⁺ climb. (Rescheduling my direct bus ticket on-line proved impossible from my phone without a local help as automated translation does not work with images.) The flight back to Paris went very smoothly by the Eastern route over the pole, with AC power (making my external battery delivered by amazon.jp fortunately superfluous since it is prohibited to use on AF flights) and Wifi running. Making my working on the paper associated with the Akaike lecture way more efficient.
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A wee stressful trip, since the races in Caen cancelled all buses and delayed the taxi enough to miss the train to Paris by 30s, catching the next available one leaving me less than one hour between the arrival of the train (delayed by construction work on the rail line) and boarding the flight at Charles de Gaulle airport, but fortunately the RER trains in Paris were running okay, there were no queues in the airport, and I thus made it in time with a bit of post-marathon jogging! (Only to be delayed at departure by one hour for stormy conditions over Germany and Austria). All this exercise proved helpful to sleep soundly and lengthily in the plane!
