Choosing a good companion for travel is something else that is very important for a memorable trip.
Otherwise you remember the trip for all the wrong reasons.
It's nice to have someone along who is understanding, enthusiastic, able to quickly adapt and not get rattled easily, someone whose temperment and personality matches or compliments your own.
Unfortunately, I had my sister along for the trip.
Our cry, the whole trip?
"Ah, Paris, the city of love...[snide look] and I'm here with
you."
My sister and I are diametrically opposing personalities. I'm not quite sure where it comes from.
She had not wanted to leave for Paris the week I did, not wanting to miss her daughter's birthday as she did for our London trip. I was not for this, as I reminded her that France was not Texas. We could not expect nice or warm weather until November.
Needless to say, this argument I lost. We stayed an extra week in town before we left for France.
*sigh*
Of course, the week I wanted to be in Paris? Beautiful, clear, warm weather.
The week we actually spent in Paris? The 2nd day we were there, it turned cold and started to rain and rained every single day we were there, except for the day before we left.
This put the kibosh on any trips to the wine country or possibly Normandy. Standing out in the cold and rain and mud was not my idea of a good time in the country so we never left the city.
My sister and I were just at odds the entire time.
The 2nd day in Paris, I came down with sinus infection and was sick most the trip. Luckily it wasn't a cold cold or the flu otherwise a fever would have kept me in bed and really ruined my trip. Instead, I was just stuffy, head full of gunk, lots of draining and no real sleep. Made for fun at the local Pharmacie, trying to figure out how to ask for sinus medication.
For those of you who don't know, my sister is morbidly obese. As a result, she is hot most of the time, out of shape and her weight puts a lot of pressure on her joints.
So, 2nd night in Paris, I'm sick, the weather has turned, I'm chilled, but I finally figure out how to turn up the heat in our room 5 degrees. I settle into bed and just as I'm warming up, my sister walks in from the bathroom and says, "Whoo! It's hot in here." and promptly goes and turns the heat off.
It was hopeless. If I wanted the heat up, she wanted it off, if I wanted the windows closed, she wanted them open, if I wanted to eat, she wasn't hungry, if I wanted to rush to the next sight, she was tired and wanted to go back to the hotel.
Of course, I had no choice but to go along with her because she did absolutely nothing to prepare for the trip. She bought no maps, no books, nothing, nada, zilch. Which means she left it to me to buy all this. Which is fine, until we were at odds on a street corner, she wanting to go back to the hotel for her 'afternoon nap' and me wanting to go to the next site across town, I had the map and needed it to get where I was going. She had nothing and couldn't even get back to the hotel without a map.
I have dreams of someday taking a trip with someone who appreciates that when I recommend they exercise and lose weight for a trip because said destination is a walking town, will heed my words and actually do something so they can keep up, rather than drag the other person down with them to their level of inability.
The hotel was very nice for the price. It was very convenient to a Metro station, but not a metro station we used with any regularity. The station we used most often was a tidy little walk away. The RER/Metro stations of St. Michel/Notre Dame:
However, the hotel was still nice.
Rick Steves in his travel book described the proprietor of our hotel as'unsmiling'. I was worried he was going to be stereotypical rude Frenchman. Perhaps he was to Rick Steves. To me, he smiled a lot, talked a lot and was a flirt. He spoke English well, and very much enjoyed my attempts at French.
View from our hotel, right center and left:
Right next to it was a cafe on one side and a diner on the other called I kid you not "An American Diner in Paris" that served diner food.
The price of food in Paris was outrageous. One could not eat a meal in a cafe for less than $23 American. A Coke Lite in such a cafe was $6.50 American. By the end of the trip I was back to eating candybars and sodas from the local bodegas (I'm not sure what they call them in French) or supermarches or hot dogs from the local delis (they're orange colored for some reason). Just as well, almost every French food I put in my mouth made me ill. A friend of my sister's who is a French cop took us out one night to a 'real' French restaurant. I ate snails, duck, tarte tatin and 1/2 bottle of wine. Never got sick at all. Go figure.
