GENERAL DRIVEL

The holiday is over and the journey begins.

I am well and truly museumed out. In 27 days, I managed to visit/see (mostly with Dad, plus a few extras):

• 7 churches and cathedrals
• 14 palaces and historical buildings
• 6 art museums
• 17 historical museums
• The Louvre (which is really a bit of all the above rolled into one)
• 3 markets
• 6 Christmas markets
• 4 ancient Roman structures
• 2 gardens
• 4 Bridges
• 2 educational wine tastings
• 1 Ballet

We also took a 1 bus tour, 1 tram tour, and went shopping for new luggage (which I then took quite some time to repack after unpacking everything from my old one).

By the end of the trip we were whizzing through museums and historical buildings as it was all starting to look the same. My retrospective blog articles (post dated from Venice Part 2, to Paris) will also likely be shorter – I should be working on them now, but it’s much more effort to think back than to write my current thoughts, and I haven’t recovered enough to do that yet! If you do ever plan to travel and write, for the sake of your sanity make sure you allow enough time each day to do it as you go along!!

There were quite a few things I missed – as it turns out, aside from being cold, winter isn’t a great time to visit as many attractions are closed, or have substantial sections closed off renovations. Also, not much seems to be open on Mondays. In the future if I travel like this, I’ll be sure to schedule that as a rest day!

I’m very much enjoying the ease and comfort of first class train travel, compared to air travel. It’s worth checking train bookings for different times of the day, as the prices can vary. For my Paris to Nancy trip, I actually got a cheaper price on 1st class than 2nd class for this departure time!

BAG REVIEW

The new bag, an Osprey Sojourn 80 which is a suitcase/backpack hybrid, has already proven to be a good buy, although it WAS very difficult to get my stuff down to 80L + a backpack when that’s now my entire life for an unknown period of time! I find it much easier to roll than my normal suitcase, I think partly because it is narrower so my arm isn’t stretched as far away from the side of my body. The narrower width also means that my short ass can actually lift the damn thing up stairs without having to contort myself to avoid dragging it along the ground.

Major plus for short people!

Over and out.