Paris

Over Thanksgiving, Jennifer and I took a weeklong vacation in Paris.  We’ve been talking about going for years and just put it off and put it off and finally just decided we had to go this year or we never would.  We haven’t been on a vacation together since 2004.

So we started planning to go in the off-season.  We watched for ticket deals on Kayak.com and kept our dates flexible.  We searched for hotels and found the Hotel des Grands Ecoles in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Doing it this way made it far more reasonable. The flight didn’t cost any more than a flight to a lot of US destinations from New Orleans. After the exchange rate, the hotel didn’t cost us any more than a typical 8 night stay in a US hotel.

We hit Paris and really did get the most out of our week there. We walked the city from end to end. It was cold, of course, but we adjusted. We even got to see snow flurries on the Champs Elysees from the ferris wheel. We climbed all 704 steps to the second level of the Eiffel tower (and took the elevator ride on the final stretch to the top). We climbed the Notre Dame, too and hit the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay, and explored the Catacombes.

And, of course, we ate. And we didn’t think twice about any of it. Foie Gras, cream, bread, desserts, whatever. In fact, we both managed to lose a couple of pounds.

One question we get asked a lot is if we were treated well. We were treated well and everyone was polite. Neither of us know French, but we learned a little bit — enough to be polite and greet people initially. The effort is appreciated. Because it’s the off-season, things weren’t so crowded and everyone was in a good mood. We were occasionally not recognized as tourists receiving French-only restaurant menus and being asked for directions more than once.

It’s definitely a trip we would recommend checking out. We took a TON of photos of course. I’ve labeled most of them with captions and all of them are geo-tagged so they can be viewed on a map. You can check out the entire set, starting here.


Scott Harney

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