The first trip that Terri and I took together was to Paris, France. We had been dating for about six months and I thought a trip to Paris in the springtime would be romantic. We flew from Toronto to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

We spent the first five days of our trip in Paris seeing the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Napoleon's tomb, the Arc de Triomphe, the Musée d'Orsay and Champs-Elysées. We also did four walking tours. In Toronto I found a book-on-tape called Paris Walks. It contained two cassettes with a walking to work on each side. We listened to them before our trip but they were really designed to be listened to as you walked the streets of Paris. I had my Walkman and I bought a special splitter so we could hook up two sets of headphones. Terri and I may have looked silly both listening to the same Walkman as we wandered around but the tours were great. We would listen to a section of the tape then pause it and walked down to a corner somewhere. We would restart the tape and listen to something about that area of the city.

After five days in the city we took a high-speed train down to Lyon. We spent a day and night there looking at the Roman ruins and a couple of beautiful cathedrals. Then we rented a car and drove out through the countryside to a small village called Thiers. Terri had seen a picture of the village and wanted to see the architecture for herself. It turned out this was the knife making capital of France. We toured the knife making factories and bought a ourselves a set of steak knives. This was our first joint purchase and it seemed like a big step in our relationship.

Then we drove east into the Beaujolais region and spent the night in a little town called Belleville. We took a tour of a vineyard and bought some wine in their gift shop. From there we continued east to Grenoble near the border of Switzerland. We took a cable car ride up to the top of a mountain and had dinner in a restaurant overlooking the town. We watched the sun set and the lights come on and then took the Cable car back down in the dark.

The next day we boarded a train and headed south to Marseille. We wanted to see Marseille because Terri had a movie that was filmed there. We walked along the harbor front and stuck our feet in the Mediterranean. The next day we went up on to the hillside to see the cathedral. It was a windy day and as Terri came out the door of the cathedral the wind blew her dress up and she screamed. I saw Paris, I saw France, I saw Terri underpants!

We wrote a high-speed train back to Paris and had two more days in the city. We went to the Musée d'Orsay and Notre Dame cathedral. The parapets were closed so we couldn't go up to see the gargoyles up close. We looked around the inside but was getting close to the end of the day and we had to cut our tour short. We ate dinner in the Montparnasse section of the city where Ernest Hemmingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald hung out in the 1920s.

To get home we had to take the train and back to Charles de Gaulle airport. After two weeks of speaking French Terri couldn't take any more so I tried to understand the directions for which trained to take. The train we took was on the correct line but somewhere along the way it split off in the wrong direction. We got off the train and tried to backtrack but that didn't work. In desperation we left the train station and tried to find a taxi. Terri went into a police station and ask them to call one for us. We waited a long time but finally one arrived and took us to the airport.

At the airport we found out we were in the wrong terminal so we took a bus to the other side of the airport. We were really late and we ran with for the check-in desk. We got our boarding passes and made it through into the lounge just-in-time. Terri was ready to kill me. She was exhausted and just wanted to get home.

Return to Home Page

Here are the stories of other travelling I have done:

• England, France and Scotland
• Juno Beach Centre, France
• Voltigeurs du Quebec
• Paris, France
• The West Coast Trail