Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 1
I was thinking to myself the other day that we really like the airport. Ok, so were at the airport right now waiting to fly out to France so whats not to like you’re probably wondering? Fair enough question but we *really* like being here. I remember coming to the airport a few months ago to pickup my Dad who was coming back from England and waiting in the International arrivals gate and couldn’t help but notice how happy everyone was. Not only did you have the people coming home from a long trip who were happy to be back but also there were the people there waiting to greet them. I can tell you that other than departing on a nice trip, the next best thing is coming home after a long flight and walking through those doors and see the loved one waiting for you that first familiar face after a few weeks of being away. Whats not to love? Now business travel on the other hand is none of this. Its bad leaving and only marginally better getting home. Nobody I know likes to travel a lot on business no matter where they go. After a while its all the same.
On this trip we will be flying again on our favourite airline: British Airways. We’ve gone to Europe a few times on BA and we’ve never been disappointed. We booked these tickets on our BA frequent flyer points and were fortunate enough to have enough points to be able to book business class tickets end to end. The last time we went business class was in 1999.
One of the main responsibilities that I have on our trips is to be the official photographer. I have had the same camera for over 10 years and have been confident that it has been able to bring home some reasonably good pictures on every trip that we’ve been on. A few months ago I finally replaced my camera with a new digital camera and this new one will be the only one that Ill be bringing on this trip. Now Ill be honest, I’mI’m bit worried about whether the pictures from the new camera will be as good as the old one. Theres also the fact that I had a lot of experience with my previous camera and I’m still getting used to this new one so the end results may be potentially be quite different. I’m really going to be disappointed if I can bring home even a few really good pictures as photography has been a passion of mine for a long time.
Our Excellent Adventures email distribution list is up to 65 people this year. Most of the names are connected to the companies where Barb and I work but it also going out to friends in Germany and the U.S. I am usually able to spend the most time on this first chapter of the Adventure but all of the rest of them are sent out directly as I write them at Internet cafés that we find. One of the things that I find when I read the Adventure journals when I get home is how many spelling and grammar mistakes there are. This unfortunately is a by product of me becoming hopelessly dependent on spell check. Having to write something from my notes and then click Send is very disconcerting as I usually like to spend a lot more time proofreading but this step usually gets sacrificed when Im paying for Internet time by the minute. Hopefully you’ll forgive my sloppy writing as you’re reading this.
As we were leaving on a late flight tonight and we both went to work today, it was mostly on Saturday and Sunday that we really started the final preparations for our trip. All of the flights have been booked since mid-July and the accommodations were finalized about 3 weeks ago. This past weekend was mostly spent doing last minute laundry and yesterday we started packing. Many people that we talked to believed that we start packing up a week or more before leaving. This of course is simply not possible as most of the things that we take with us we use every day. Also we have gotten pretty good at planning what needs to get packed and getting it all done on the last day.
It was around early July when we started planning where we would go this year and we rolled around a number of different ideas before settling on France. As we had already been to France before we wanted to make the focus of this trip something a little bit different. On this trip we wont be going out of our way to see the churches or palaces (OK, well see the Eiffel tower again if were in the neighbourhood). Our primary agenda for this trip is going to be wine and food. Ill give more details of what that all means as we go along but if this works out we may start planning our Excellent Adventure agendas quite a bit differently from now on.
Ill check in again once we reach our first location: the Burgundy district of France.
Au revoir,
B+B
Continue on to Barb & Baden’s Excellent French Adventure ver 2.0 – Part 2
