So far so good. We arrived in Nice with our luggage. We communicated with the bus station clerk and found our route to the apartment. We boarded the bus and I sat, with Travis standing beside me so that a little girl could take the remaining chair. The logistics of vacation was going well. We […]
Reims There’s something you really need to understand about Reims. As you’re reading this, if you’re not familiar with the city or the French language in general, you’re reading it as Reems. Don’t worry, I did too. In pre-trip planning we would look up the pronunciation of Reims and become confused. Everything we looked […]
Anniversary Day We’ve got to get that carousel marked off the list. We spend the morning walking through Montmartre and checking out the carousel and the Montmartre funicular (included in our metro pass). We have croissants and coffee at a lovely sidewalk cafe. We go back to the Biscuiterie de Montmartre and purchase macarons […]
Musée du Louvre (€12/person, €24 total) We’re basically going here because everyone has said we have to. The funny thing is that all of the people who tell you to go don’t sound like they had much fun themselves. They’ll tell you about how crowded it was and how the Mona Lisa was small and the […]
Giverny We hopped a train, then a bus, and ended up at Claude Monet’s house. I clearly remember the first time I saw Water Lilies in a textbook and thought it looked like dreams. What I didn’t realize was that Monet wasn’t painting dreams, he was painting his backyard. A foundation now keeps his expansive backyard garden […]
Arc De Triomphe* (€9,5/person, €19 total) Now we’re doing Day 4. A quick metro ride takes us directly to the Arc de Triomphe. I don’t have high expectations here, but it turns out that this is really cool. There’s a museum inside at the top of the arc. I’m flabbergasted to find out that it was […]
Panthéon* (€8,5/person, €17 total) We get told not to eat our croissants on the steps of the Panthéon. So we finish them outside of the fence before we go inside. It’s beautiful. There’s a tiny replica Panthéon in one of the rooms and we spend some time looking at that before we go downstairs into the mausoleum. They […]
So I started planning a trip to Italy, and I ended up booking a trip to France. This is the second time Italy has been passed over, so I feel like I need to start examining why I refuse to go to Italy. But that’s a different post. This is about the French Riviera. […]
Arrive in Paris at 8:30 a.m. Well this sounded easier than it is. The airport is huge and the train terminal connected to it is confusing. We’ve taken the RER B to Gare du Nord like we were supposed to, but we have to take a different line from there and I’m not sure how to get there. […]
“Come in, come in,” he says as he holds the door open for us. We are later than we anticipated, and now I’m worried that we have made him late for something as well. We drag our bags into the lobby area of the apartment building as quickly as we can. He gives us the […]