A five euro tab for café creme, croissant and fresh squeezed orange juice beat the hotel’s 15 euro charge for a full breakfast that included a rubbery plain omelet and cold pancakes, and we are off to the Musée des Arts Forains (The Fairground Art Museum). According to the English language handout, actor and antique […]

   I woke up on our first full day in Paris with no wifi, and worse, could not figure out how the shower works. It’s embarrassing to have to explain this to the hotel clerk, who was working off the same wifi as I interrupted her, and then having to explain to this American how […]

   The first rule of flying by the seat of your pants is to have pants to fly from the seat of. Our original plan of sauntering from Paris to Barcelona and then onto parts south and east (chasing warmer temperatures) was immediately short-circuited by the total lack of available seats for Eurail pass holders. In […]

D220 to Paris  Say your ten years old and you’re going to Disneyland for the first time. You’re bugeyed with excitement as you enter the Magic Kingdom. There’s just so much you’ve been told there is to see and do. You can’t contain yourself, and you also don’t know where to begin. But you’re ten-year-old […]

   Carol is the only person I have ever known who can turn a fool’s errand into a certain done deal. For almost three years, we’ve been sitting on a pair of Eurail passes that had gone unused originally due to Covid. A series of extensions kept them valid through the period of travel restrictions, but […]

   We’re inside of a week before our planned departure for Europe, and we’re still not sure where we’re landing. That suits Carol and me just fine. We’ve had only one trip together where we had to be in a specific place at a specific time, and I could feel my shoulders scraping against the constraints […]

   Last week I mailed my old passport back as part of my renewal application. For the next two or three months I can’t leave the country if I wanted to. This is different from Covid. Then, travel wasn’t available; now it is but I can’t go anywhere. It doesn’t matter that we hadn’t planned any […]

“Airplane mode”    The disadvantage of booking an airport hotel room the night before your flight home is that being way out from the city, your café and wine shop options will be slim, if they exist at all. I’d taken care of the wine shop issue by packing a leftover bottle of room wine from […]

“Last Tango in Orléans”    At first I thought Carol believed she’d turned a corner with me and sightseeing based on yesterday’s achievements that included a cathedral, an Old Town walk, a fresh food market, a tram ride and a midnight light show. (Whew. Just writing it down sounds like a full week, rather than one […]

Tourist Time    Orléans sports a cathedral, an Old Town, a riverside and a recreation of the house where Joan d’Arc resided during her successful defeat of the English during the Hundred Years War. In other words, strap on the Skechers Relaxed Fits, black socks, cargo shorts, faded XXL T-shirts with “Branson Missouri” emblazoned across the […]