FRANCE

www.accordingtowillyb.com

Transcript

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Um, uh,

William Bryce's video recording: 0:17

Good morning. It is January the 28th, 2025 and straight from the highly caffeinated studio. This is According to Willie B and I, Will Bryce, am your host for the next half hour. Last week we talked about the great state of Florida And I humbly thank you for the amount of downloads that we had for our first podcast. It gave us a ranking that I was nowhere near expecting. So very much appreciated, very humbled. And I look forward to entertaining you in the next half hour to make it worth your while for tuning in again. One thing that I do want to start doing is kind of picking from random Some mom and pop business like we talked about the last time independently owned businesses throughout the u. s Whether I know who they are whether I don't I want to give them a shout out and whether it gives them one customer That's worth it for them because that could pay for their child's baseball uniform or anything so this week's according to willie b Shining star award business is none other than Crawford equipment in Mississippi. Now I have actually done business with these folks, and they are definitely taking care of business. I'll let you go and check out their website at Crawford equipment, but. If you need to get a hold of somebody to buy equipment, to talk about a restaurant equipment, they, they literally have it all. If you have a convenience store, a restaurant, doesn't matter. These people got it and they've got many, many warehouses of equipment that will suit your needs and the service to back it up. That's the biggest thing. So if you need to get ahold of them, you can get ahold of Lauren Crawford. Her number is 662 408 4742. Or you can email her at L Crawford, 671. At gmail. com, they have warehouses all throughout the South. They're in Murray, Kentucky. They're in Western Arkansas. They're in Birmingham, Alabama. They're in Pensacola, Florida, they have the means to take care of whatever needs that you have. So give Lauren Crawford a shout out over there at, Crawford equipment. And I guarantee you, they will take care of you. You tell them I sent you. So on to this week's subject, which is. France. So we're going further across the pond to a little destination over there that a lot of people are familiar with, but not a lot of people have had the opportunity to go. I was blessed enough to be able to have that opportunity to go to France for 10 days. And I got to say, I really enjoyed the trip. I wasn't sure that I would. The one thing in hindsight that I wish I had done was learn a lot more French. I can tell you that you can absolutely, not learn too much French before you go. I realize you have Google Translate and all these kinds of things, but, you'll get a lot further if you learn to speak some of the language so that you're at least able to navigate yourself around. And more especially, if you're going to drive, which we did, we rented a car and drove for 10 days from Geneva through Lyon, Grenoble, Quincy, all the way down to Paris, and then back up through the Swiss Alps to Geneva to fly home. You cannot use Google Translate on the road signs. So be prepared for that. So I'm going to start off and I'm going to tell you a few things that I think any traveler, and there's a lot of YouTube videos and stuff that tell you like, Oh, go here and stay here and go see this, go see that. Here's some things that a lot of the travel videos don't tell you. Number one, Learn as much of the language as you can, one of the things that I would recommend is be aware of your surroundings, which that's pretty much the case, whether you're in the States or you're abroad traveling. When we go on vacation, we look like tourists. We just do. And so we need to be aware of your surroundings. One of the biggest fears that I had going to France by watching YouTube videos, et cetera, et cetera. Was pickpockets. I mean, I thought they were just in herds and groves over there, but I didn't have any issue with pickpockets. They were a little more, brass, if you will. They come up to you face to face to try to scam you instead of coming up to you quietly to check your wallet. Instead, they were just trying to scam you. And they're really good at it. You know, The, food availability is different than it is here in the U. S. If I want something to eat right now, I can literally go 500 yards from where my house is and get something to eat. In France, it's kind of hard to explain, but It's a lot more sparse on your selections. And not only the locations are sparse, but times are sparse. A lot of restaurants close in the middle of the day. So if you don't get there during lunchtime. You're waiting a long time to dinner time because they would just absolutely close for 345 hours in the middle of the day. Um, and they will, you can have wine and desserts until then. That's, that's kind of their, what they do. They have wine and dessert during that time. I'm not opposed to that, but I would still like to have, if I want a cheeseburger, I want a cheeseburger. I'll have the dessert after, but I still want the cheeseburger with bacon. So, you know, the small streets, I'll tell you that, the streets over there for the most part, especially if you're traveling a lot and going through some of the small villages, some of the streets are really small, like Room for one car. That's why you see that they drive small cars is because their streets are just not as wide as our streets are here in the U S and the route, the traffic roundabouts, there's, there's roundabouts to get into the roundabouts. I kid you not. If you go over there and start driving, you'll see what I'm saying. Oh, and don't speed because you probably won't see any officers. They have little cameras hidden here and there in the bushes and the trees and the side of the road. And they will take your picture with your license number on your car. And by the time you get home, you'll get an email going, Hey, here's your ticket. You were speeding going through Lyon. Okay, so that's something definitely to watch out for. Their subway system. Same thing, make sure that you have your day planned out. Route your day with this, use the subway system. The train system is like, to me, it was really two parts. They call it train subway versus back and forth. But for me, they had a subway system, but they also had like a high speed rail train that was above ground. And that's really cool. If nothing else, just for the experience. And you get to see some of the countryside that you wouldn't normally see from the road. The subway system does stop running at certain times during the night. There is a last train. And if you missed the last train, you are going to stay wherever you are. There's a story coming up about that as well. Restrooms. Okay. So I'm going to tell this story and then tomorrow I will post some pictures on our social media pages. Unfortunately for you. And fortunately for me, I do not have pictures of about what I'm about to tell you, and I'm glad we went to a park in Quincy, France, and it was a really cool, like something you see in a movie, it's got a lake, it's just this green grass, all the paths and stuff to walk around people lying on blankets, their big sticks of bread and bottles of wine, and they're just enjoying life immensely. So we saw. And near distance that there were some boats and there was some lake activity and we wanted to go check that out. So we said, well, before we do that, in case we do wind up on a boat, let's go ahead and make a pit stop at the restroom. So this is where I behoove you to learn as much French as you can, because the sign I did not fully understand, or maybe I just didn't read it. I don't know. It's kind of like instruction manual. My wife goes in ahead of me. Now, as is custom here in the U. S., someone goes in a door, they come out, you grab the door and you go in behind them, and the door never, you know, closes in between. These restrooms are self cleaning. And by self cleaning, I mean, Multiple nozzles that wash the inside of the restroom down from floor to ceiling. And if you do not let the door close in between guests, it will go into self cleaning mode. And you will be locked in there until it finishes because the doors will lock. And water comes from everywhere. So I came back out of the restroom soaked from head to toe. Laughter. When my wife finally stopped laughing, which was a considerable amount of time, I don't blame her. I would have had the same reaction, but I had squishy shoes for the rest of the day. So now it was necessary to go rent the boat to drive around the lake in the sunshine to try and dry Will out. It was an experience. Probably the pictures of my face when I'm locked inside the restroom and figure out I can't get out and water is shooting from everywhere and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm hoping the water that they use to clean the restrooms was at least somewhat clean. I'm going to go with that. That's the way I've always stood on. Well, that was clean water. It's coming from the ceiling. It's coming from the wall. I'm good. So that was interesting. The next interesting part of that little scenario was when we went to rent the boat, we inquired, we saw these little, four people motorboats out on the lake. They had like a small 15, 20 horsepower motor on. And I was like, Oh, that's really cool. But you know, we're, we're not from here. We're from the United States. I doubt they're going to let us rent one wrong. They not only let us rent one. All we had to do was show them our driver's license and pay. I think it was a hundred dollars for an hour. And we got to take the boat. So here's in the U S you would have had to give it a blood sample and, fill out forms and duplicate and triplicate and had attorneys involved and, left up a million dollar deposit for a 20, 000 boat. It just was amazing how the difference was in the transaction. But it was a really nice time. We enjoyed being on that boat. Tomorrow I will post pictures of the boat on our social media pages. It was one of my memorable experiences over there besides the food and the desserts. Parking over there is also a challenge. It's not a parking lot. It is a car park You will be corrected. If you say parking lot, it's almost like being in North Carolina and you order a chicken fried steak It's not a chicken fried steak here It's a country fried steak and they do not understand what you're talking about until you say country fried steak our trip started out in Geneva. We flew into Geneva, then we drove to, Quincy, Leon, Grenoble, and then on into Paris. And that was really cool. We saw some of the countryside that you wouldn't normally see. If you were, just flying in and just seeing one town or one city, so we saw a lot of the countryside and like one of the towns, and I believe it was, Leon, there was a fresh market and they had tons of fresh olives and cheeses like salamis and prosciutto. And it's just, it was the coolest thing because we don't have that here in the U S and it was like being at a market back in the 1800s. So I thought that was really interesting. It was almost like you went back in time because there was no, sanitation processes and having the stuff out on display. And you know what? I was okay with it to me is vacation food. Vacation food doesn't count towards calories. It doesn't count towards sanitation. It doesn't care. It's vacation food. You want a pina colada at 5 a. m. Go for it. You want a burrito at 3 a. m. Go for it. Go for it. It's vacation food. It doesn't count. And I stand by that. So I will tell you the food was the food choices were interesting. There wasn't as many choices that I particularly cared for, but I, I tried to venture out and try some things that I wouldn't normally try. There were some cheeses that I don't like in the U S but I liked them over there because they were good. They've just seemed so much creamier and so much better. I like a lot of chicken. I will eat chicken every meal if you let me. Over there, they don't have as many chickens. I've, in the movies, always thought they did. But I'm coming to find out that they did not. Because every time I would order chicken, they would offer me what they called pigeon. Which, you guessed it, pigeon. I'm sorry, I'm not eating a pigeon. You can call it by whatever name you want to. It's still a pigeon. They're still at my feet around my table, like at a sidewalk cafe that we were at. They're still pecking and eating stuff off the ground. They're eating my leftovers. They're eating the things that I drop off the table, regardless of what they eat. I don't want to eat a pigeon. I'm okay with a chicken and I don't care which one's cleaner. But I am familiar with chicken, so I'm not going to go off, keep going on chicken. But just be aware that if you ask for chicken, you're probably going to get pigeon. And, you know, maybe it's good. I don't know. I will say I did try something that was totally out of my norm and it was totally accident, if you will. I'll tell you the story. So we went into a really nice restaurant one night. We were absolutely starving. We hadn't had very much food that day because we had learned that you don't get food in the middle of the day. So I saw a steak on the menu and I'm like, yes, give me a steak. Give me the potato. Give me the whole nine yards. I am starving. The waiter comes out, and I feel pretty confident in the amount of French that I had learned to be able to order my dinner and my wife's. So I ordered my wife's dinner, and it went flawlessly. The waiter was actually impressed with my French. I went to order my dinner. And I decided to venture off a little bit, if you will. And, We started talking about how I wanted my steak cooked. So I said, you know what? So I said, well, maybe I'll just do rare. And then he said something about steak tartare. I said, you know what? You only live once. Why not? I got the steak. Ladies and gentlemen, when I say, it still brings tears to my eyes. When I say that this steak was raw, it was actually cold to the touch. A bandaid on this thing and it would have walked right out of the restaurant as they say. But wow, I ate it. I ate every bite of it because I ordered it. And my wife said, well, you should send it back. I'm like, nope, this is, I ordered this. I'm going to eat it. And I did. The taste of that meat remained with me for multiple days. I would never order it again. I now even go a step further. I won't even order a rare steak anymore. I stick to medium and medium rare now, just because of the taste of that steak. So, you know, it's cool to venture out and, you know, like I tell you, you only live once regardless. Some people don't like to travel, right. But for me, travel is the escape of a lifetime. You can, and it's not about the t shirts. It's not about the trinkets that you bring home. It's about the mental pictures that you take while you're there. It's about the experiences that you take in while you're there. That's why I'm so passionate about. Being a foodie is that because when I go to eat at a restaurant, I'm not just going to eat a meal if I wanted to eat a meal, I would just eat at home. I'm going for the experience. And that's the thing that we have to remember in life is to take in the experiences. Now, remember I was telling you about. The scam artists. So when we got to Paris, we wanted to take in the Louvre. We wanted to take in the Eiffel Tower. There's so many iconic, sites to see in, in Paris. I felt like I was some kind of secret spy because I had done my research on YouTube and Google and everything. And I And found out that there was actually a secret entrance to the Louvre. You went down through the shopping mall and came back up and voila, no lines. We literally stood in no lines when the line up top was miles long. So that, and if you, you can still look it up on YouTube to this day and you'll see a video showing you how to get down there to the ticket booth where there is no line. But here's where you have to be aware. We didn't have our tickets ahead of time, so as we are walking towards the booth to get our ticket, we were approached by a gentleman and trying to sell us some tickets at a discounted rate. Well, like I always tell you, you get what you pay for. And because he was trying to sell them so cheap, something just told me my spidey senses went off, and I'm like, this is not right. So we said, no, no, we, we went on to the, up to the, the ticket booth. Now the guy is still right behind us all the way to the ticket booth. I thought, well, maybe the guys he's legit. As I'm talking to the lady, telling her that, Hey, the guy behind me is trying to sell me some tickets. I mean, is it okay to buy those? She said, what guy I turned around, this guy has disappeared. I mean, in thin air. So she said, no, that usually when they're selling those tickets, they're already, they they're picking up off the ground or out of the trash, and they're just selling used tickets because they're not stamped or punched or anything like that. So. We saved some money there by not buying tickets from, a scalper, as we call it here in the U S we go to a ball game. We can go outside and get tickets. Not that I've ever done that, but that's what I hear. I knew when we were in, Grenoble, there was, You know how you have the sky lifts here? We have ski lifts. We had sky lifts across amusement parks, things like that. They had these glass dome balls that, and I think it was a set of six that were on the cable and they went down the mountainside. Up top there was a really cool restaurant up there. So you, you had phenomenal views and it was really something that you kind of had to really research online to even know that it was there because it was so far off the beaten path. So that's the thing is do your research before you go so that you don't miss those things off the beaten path, because that's where you're going to miss those memorable experiences. I will tell you that elevators in most hotels. Um, or when I say they're smaller, uh, plan on one person and a suitcase. I had never felt more claustrophobic in my life and I'm not scared of tight spaces, but that was a little bit different. Desserts over there, whether it's Geneva, whether it's, France, doesn't matter. I never found, that's one thing I never found. Bad was a bad dessert everywhere we seem to go. They just had the most phenomenal desserts. And I'm talking desserts on another level. I'm talking about desserts that were made in heaven by angels. And I think that actually used ingredients from clouds to make some of these desserts. They were just incredibly light, incredibly creamy. It's just, there's no way to describe them that we have. I promise you I've eaten enough desserts in the U S to know that we don't have anything. Like that here in the U. S. Not that I've tried yet. If you know of something, let me know and I'll go check it out. So the Eiffel Tower. So here's where this gets interesting. So on our trip, to Paris, I had planned on staying one night in Paris because we were there for 10 days when I booked it on Expedia. I saw a hotel that I thought was the absolute most mind blowing cool hotel I ever seen in my life. And I'm like, I don't care. We have to stay here. I don't know where this is at. I know it's in Paris, but we have to stay here. And it had views of the water. How could you go wrong? Well, let me tell you. The name of the hotel was an independent. It was called the VIP Yacht Hotel. Now, you've seen yachts here in the U. S. I've seen yachts. When you tell me, hey, I have a yacht, you've, you've got a really big fancy boat. To have put the name yacht or the word yacht on this floating establishment, I Was, an abomination and to Webster dictionary. Let me just go ahead and tell you we drove around for a good 45 minutes, starving, exhausted, frustrated. We had driven all day and we hadn't had. We didn't get lunch because we got into an area where there were no restaurants all the way over there. We drove and drove and finally the GPS kept saying, you have arrived. I disagree. I don't know who is in the space bubble for that GPS up there trying to navigate, but they were wrong. We were not, we had not arrived. All that we could see was this. What looked like a barge, and it had the name, the yacht VIP, VIP Yacht Hotel. So I told my wife, I said, you know what, I bet this is the boat that takes you down river to the hotel. I could not be more wrong. I could try, but I would not be. So I finally went inside this barge and there was a hotel desk, just like in a, in a lobby, although I'm only five, six and the ceilings were incredibly low. When I asked if this was the address, he proudly said yes. As I began to look around and take more in, I'm like, there is no way we're going to stay here. This does not look safe. I'm, you know, I'm, I just want to go. And so I told him, I said, let me, let me go check with my wife. I'll be right back. So I went back to the car and I told her, I said, so this is our hotel. She said, what do you mean? I said, no, this is the hotel. So we got on Expedia, Asked for a cancellation and then in the meantime booked a Hilton hotel, which we know what those are Again when you need to really plan out your trip because the addresses in France Some of them seem really similar and you really don't know exactly where you are So we wound up booking a Hilton not four blocks away We booked it at Disneyland Paris, which was two and a half hours away, but the damage was done. There was nowhere else to get a hotel. As I drove around looking for the hotel that was not ours. Again, frustrated, tired, fighting all the traffic in Paris, which you cannot even begin to fathom how bad it was. There were no parking spots. As I mentioned, parking is a luxury. I wound up. In part, I kid you not, on a sidewalk, under a tree, and went inside and told the guy, he said, yes, you, you are booked at the Hilton. I said, awesome. I finally felt like that within a few minutes, I was going to have food in front of me and a bed. Wrong. I was booked at a Hilton. I just wasn't booked at that Hilton. And he told me where the hotel was. I said, how far is that? And he said, well, it's at least two and a half hours with traffic right now. So we drove all the way out to Disneyland Paris Found something to eat collapsed the next morning got up took the subway system We did we were done with driving. We're like we don't want to drive anywhere else. Let's just take the subway system So we took the subway all the way back into Paris and we've seen all the sights of Paris a few scam artists along the way We finally got an Uber to take us back over to where the subway system was and he made one extra loop and took us by the Eiffel Tower because it was all lit up. It was late at night and he said, y'all aren't leaving are you? And I said, well, yeah, we have to get back out to our hotel at Disneyland Paris. And he said, no, you have to stay. Until 11 o'clock until they turn on the twinkly lights, he said. It looks like the Eiffel Tower is covered in diamonds. He said, you cannot come all the way to Paris and not see that. So we bought in and we stayed until 11 o'clock. And sure enough, it was I'll post a picture of this, but it was absolutely phenomenally not something you need to miss because it's, um. There's no words to describe it. It was absolutely phenomenal. However, like I told you, there are some subway trains that stopped running at night and you need to know those times. We basically sped walk to our first train and barely made it onto that. We had to take three different trains to get back out to Disneyland Paris. As we made each connection, we were getting on the last train of the day. Knowing this, when we got to the last train that was going to take us on the final journey, final leg of the journey. When I say we ran to that train that we basically almost dove inside the doors as they were closing is an understatement and in the story, we finally got back to Disneyland Paris, got to our hotel, we were able to drive back into Geneva the next day and turn in our rental car and get back on a plane and come back to the U. S. Would I go back to France? Would I check it out again? I don't know that I would be interested in seeing Paris again. But to see some of the other small towns in France, these are just farming communities. They are small communities, but they got their narrow streets. But there's so much history in each one. You'll see these massive wooden doors that are just 20 feet tall and look like they were built back in the 1500s maybe, but it was just, it was so neat. And to think about the kind of history that must be there and I'm, I'm not a big history buff, but it really kind of got me to thinking. So I would like to go back someday and check out, some of the other small towns throughout the countryside, you know, maybe by train, I don't know. If by car, driving through France was a little, a little bit nerve wracking, but it was, the trip was definitely worth it. And when you get, when you get back home and you get, finally gets your nerves back together, you know that it was worth it. And you've made memories that will now last a lifetime. And you know what, with all that, that ladies and gentlemen, squishy shoes and all, I bid you farewell. This is the end of this episode. You do not want to miss next week's episode where we're going to start. It's be a two part series and we're going to take a look at Jamaica. That's right. We're going even further across that great big pond and take a look at Jamaica. And that will be a two part series, but until that time, check us out on our social media pages, tick talk, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. And like I said, I will be posting pictures of things that I've talked about during the podcast. If you have any comments, suggestions, any windows, whether they could be good, bad, or ugly, you leave them and I will do my very level best to answer each and every one. Once again, I cannot thank you enough for listening till I see you again caffeinate and conquer and have a great day