Planning Stage

After years of refusing to travel to France, Art found that he enjoyed our cruise day stop in Villefranche and our day trip to Aix en Provence. When we decided that our 'big' trip in Fall, 2012 would be our first Oceania cruise - a transatlantic cruise on the new ship Rivieria, the next question was where, in Europe, would we go before the cruise. We learned from our two previous transatlantic cruises that we loved staying in one place for about a week and then cruising home. After much discussion (returning to Venice or Barcelona or going to Paris for the first time. To my delight, Art, despite his previous statements about his lack of interest in traveling there, agreed that he'd rather go some place he hadn't been to before. Paris. Fit the bill and big time planning began

I shall be forever grateful to our friends who were experienced Francophiles and to Trip Advisor's regulars on the Paris Forum for their willing and patient help in planning our 5 nights/5 1/2 days in Paris. After talking with us, our friends Cheryl and Chris decided to take a river cruise leaving from Paris and spending pre and post cruise days there. So we embarked on an almost daily email barrage of recommending Web sites, articles, and lots of money and time saving hints among us.

Key planning elements: booking a room at the Renaissance Paris Vendome using Marriott Rewards points...what a deal. They were having a special deal - we booked 5 nights for the points required for 4! Next: finding an airfare ( one way since we'll be cruising home). The best I could do was on American Airlines from Charlotte to Chicago connecting to Iberian. It does seem strange to go west to go east but the fare is worth it. We still have to decide if we will fly from Paris to Barcelona (the embarkation port for our cruise) and have the worry of keeping our luggage under the severe weight limit of European Regional airlines or take the new high speed train from Paris to Figeures in Spain where we'd have to change to the train to Barcelona but have no luggage limit. Still pondering.

With the 2 key items out of the way, itinerary planning begins in earnest. Planning for 5 days, geographically grouping the sights we most want to visit and figuring that we will do enough walking to burn off the excess calories we plan to ingest (bread, pastries, and delicious French food ).

Eiffel Tower Adding this picture to show what I dream about every day. I now know that travel planning is an addiction that creates serious withdrawal symptoms when I try to abstain for even one day :)

May 24... Having a blast planning with our friend Cheryl and Chris who are leaving for their trip in late July. Email messages back and forth, sometimes several times a day, with links to new sites, suggestions from the generous people on Trip Advisor's Paris forum for restaurants, transportation, etc. Now working on learning new Blog software so that I can blog with my iPad to avoid carrying my net book.

Guess that worked...first try to move a picture from one of my albums to the blog :)