Barb and Baden’s Excellent Paris Adventure – Part 1

Paris subway sign as seen on our last visit in 2004

It’s been 8 years since we started using the term Excellent Adventure. It was on our trip to the South Pacific (New Zealand and the Cook Islands) in 1999 that I first began sending out regular emails to friends and family throughout our trip describing the details of our journey as it happened. Things just kind of evolved from there and the ExcellentAdventure.ca blog is where it’s all ended up. Regular readers of my blog (and everyone else reading this for that matter) may believe that our current visit to Paris was spontaneous – based on the fact that I hadn’t written much on this subject over the past few months. In truth, Barb and I had been planning this since the beginning of the year. We just didn’t really go out of our way to talk about it so much.

Visit #3
As I am typically in the habit of doing, I’m posting the first chapter of this Excellent Adventure just before leaving to the airport. This being our 3rd visit to Paris (and 9th time to Europe overall), this trip distinguishes itself from what we haven’t done to plan our itinerary. On previous trips, we usually have a fairly well defined agenda in mind or at a minimum, a lengthy list of things that we want to see while we are in a far-off destination.

Not so this time.

If anything, the planning of this trip exclusively involved booking the flight and the hotel. And even the hotel was a re-booking of the same hotel from our last Paris visit in 2004. Everything else that we’re planning on doing will be decided on a day to day basis. If we just walk along the Seine or sit in a cafe for hours on end, we’ll consider the day successful.

The Best City of All
Without hesitation, Barb and I will quickly confess that Paris is both of our favourite city destination. The unique part of this trip will be the we have never been to Paris in the spring time as we have typically made a habit of going on our major vacations in the fall. We are still planning on doing a longer fall trip this year but we had decided that we wanted to make a short visit here at a different time of the year.

As I usually do, I’ll be posting updates of this Excellent Adventure every few days. I always carry a small notepad in my pocket and take notes of interesting things and eventually compose them on my Dell Axim PDA in the hotel. Depending on where I find Internet access, it will make my postings easy or more challenging but these days I no longer have to do much planning to get online.

My next update will be when we’ve arrived in the City of Light.

Baden

Continue reading the next chapter of our Excellent Paris Adventure …