<< Day 2 - Les Cars Rouges
One of the perks of renting furnished apartments during this trip was that we would be able to cook and do laundry for ourselves, saving both money and luggage space.
Upon arrival in Paris, after flying for 6 hours, making our way by transit from the airport into the city, and then having the washing machine explained in broken English/French, it is no wonder that when we actually tried to use it on Sunday evening, we were just a little bit puzzled by the different symbols that we could pick from.
It's also possible that some of our confusion came from my thinking that the appliance was both a washer and a dryer...
At any rate, on Sunday afternoon, we decided that we needed to do a load of laundry - Lynn had an unfortunate incident with a pigeon on Saturday, and we figured we might as well test the washer out.
We happily loaded it up, found the detergent, got it started and went out to do the Red Bus tour. About two hours later, after having thoroughly enjoyed the tour, we came back, expecting to find our clothes washed, dried and ready to be put away.
What we found instead, were soaking wet clothes. I'm not even sure they'd been spun out.
So, being optimists, we restarted the machine, picking slightly different settings, and went out for supper.
Approximately two hours later, the machine stopped working, and we pulled out very wet clothes. Again.
Did I mention that we are optimists? Third time's the charm, is what we all thought, and so we started the machine again, because SURELY the picture of a feather floating meant a dry cycle, right!?!!?
After a nice dessert and a relaxing evening, we noticed that the washer had not, in fact, stopped this time, and was running through again.
I decided to go to bed, sure that although it was running through again, it would eventually stop, and we would have very clean clothes. I put on my sleep mask, and put my ear plugs in, and dropped off to sleep while Lynn puttered around the bedroom packing and Barb was reading in the living room, where she was sleeping on the pull-out couch.
Three hours later, I groggily came to with the realization that the light was on, and people were talking...
"It's starting to run through again!!! What should we do?"
... mumbled discussion... (remember, I had ear plugs in...)
"I just don't know what to do - I can't get it to stop!"
... more mumbled discussion... people leaving the room...
... and coming back in...
"I can't even get it open!!!"
... mumbled discussion...
At which point I gave up every pretense of being asleep, and sat up, a little bit grumpy at being disturbed so insistently.
To learn that the washer was on the verge of starting AGAIN, the door was locked, and no amount of button pushing had any effect whatsoever.
Finally, about half an hour later, with all three of us anxiously pushing buttons, resetting the timer, turning the power on and off, and ANYTHING else we could think of to make the machine stop, it unlocked itself.
I'm still not sure what made it decide to do that; by this time, all of the buttons had taken on almost sinister meanings to us - a floating feather meant run forever, apparently.
We opened the door, and pulled out our boiling hot dripping laundry, hung it up in the bathroom, and fell back into bed.
All I could think was - tomorrow is going to be a VERY long day...
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