Unexpected Sunshine

We woke up this morning to rain, and it seemed that the interminable drip, drip, drip of raindrops on our roof would continue all day. But the rain let up, so we took our "morning" walk around the park (it was just after noon). Then later the sun appeared. We were delighted to be enjoying a balmy, sunny day.

We spent more time today on our travel planning. Sometimes it seems that we are trying to punch our way out of a paper bag--unsuccessfully. We tried to set up an account on the SCNF site (for trains in France), but we were unable to figure out how to enter a phone number in the correct format. Every way we tried led to the same error message: "The phone number is incorrect." We searched in vain for help on the website and tried to send a message, but apparently you can only ask questions about rail trips for which you have a reference number. Sigh.

We found a way around that problem, we thought. We'll just purchase tickets without an account. But at the end of the process, we had to provide an address to send the tickets to. The final step: select a country. But the USA was nowhere to be found on the drop down list. Foiled again!

Finally we discovered a great workaround: Capitaine Train, a very customer friendly website. Finally. But then when we tried to pay for the tickets, our Capital One card was declined. Why? After approving three international hotel charges recently, Capital One decided that this international charge warranted a fraud alert and blocked the transaction. Fortunately, we were able to use Paypal. It's a good thing this is going to be a marvelous trip!

This evening we went to Darryl's C-2 workshop. For the second week in a row, we had twelve squares, this time with three out couples, over one hundred C-2 dancers. Darryl had the middle row of squares checkerboarded, which helped a lot on the tidal wave formations. He worked on Once Removed Lines. Just when we figured we had this thing down, he said, now let's work on some shape changers. Hmmmmm. I'll have to put on my thinking cap for sure. He gave us directions, so I know how to do the calls (like Once Removed Lines Wheel and Deal), but I'm still scratching my head about why it should work that way....