After several months of planning, including one or two "this is never going to happen" scares, I finally left, on March 30, for an eight day trip to Paris. I live in California, and my mom, who went with me, lives in Florida, so I planned the trip so that we'd meet in New York and fly together to Paris from there.


The five and a half hour flight from Los Angeles to New York was uneventful. The girl next to me was taking notes from "Wine For Dummies." Call me nutty, but I would think a book "for dummies" would be simple enough that you wouldn't need to take notes from it. Guess that's just me. I didn't eat the offered omelette or cereal.

My mom and I didn't even discuss how we'd find each other when we got to New York, but I knew we arrived on different airlines at about the same time and figured we'd both find our way to our departing gate and greet each other eventually. I got there first and watched for her until I was bored, then changed some of my cash to francs. I only had a few hundred on me, because I planned to use my ATM card, which is also a Visa, to get money and just "charge" things once we got there. That plan worked out very, very well, and most credit card companies give you a better exchange rate than almost any place where you actually change cash, so I recommend this method if you travel abroad. Just make sure your ATM card has a Plus or Star symbol on it, and if your PIN is more than four digits long, change it to four before you leave, and you're all set. When I turned around from the money exchange window, there was my mom! We sat in some airport restaurant and ate fish and chips and fried calamari, both of which were very good and not as exhorbitantly priced as you might expect from an airport restaurant.

We checked in at our gate, and since the agents were both men and they were both nice and friendly, I asked them about upgrading us to first class (you'd be amazed what you can get when you ask nicely). Unfortunately, the flight was sold out, so not only were the upgrades unavailable, but we'd be sitting shoulder to shoulder in coach with the rest of the very full herd. However, as we were boarding, I smiled at the guys and said, "this is your last chance to tell me someone didn't show up and we can sit up front...!" They told us to hold off for a minute, maybe they could do something. Then they said the seats weren't together, but there were two available, and my mom and I looked at each other and said, "We don't care!" because hey, it was First Class, baby! and besides, we had the next ten days together. So they change our seats and we get on the plane, only to find out that yes, the seats were in the "front" of the plane but no, they weren't first class. They were just in the FRONT of coach. And separate from each other. And mine was against a window with a young couple and their ten month old child in the two seats next to mine, all of whom I'd have to disturb if I wanted to get out at any point during the next five and a half hours. Mousies don't like being trapped. Not a fun flight, though the baby was extremely well behaved and his parents were almost apologetic enough for not having just bought him his own seat in the first place. I shouldn't grouch, because it really wasn't that bad, but I'm not sure I can reiterate enough: Mousies don't like being trapped. My mom and I decided those two agents at the gate were probably having a pretty good laugh at our expense by about an hour into the flight. The couple did get up while they served the food, which was some yellowy, Icelandic chicken stuff and rice and didn't actually taste half bad. I figured Grabby Baby probably made it impossible for them to eat and would have done the same for me if they'd stayed. I hurried through a few bites of the meal so they could sit back down. They really were a very nice and considerate couple.

Anyway, our connection was in Reykjavic, Iceland, as we were on Iceland Air. All the stewardesses were Icelandic. If these six or seven women were a cross section of the Icelandic population, that is one good looking country. They were all beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed Nordic looking women, each one jaw-droppingly gorgeous. For what that's worth. I bought us both refrigerator magnets at the Reykjavic airport, because hey, when would I ever be in Iceland again?

The three hour flight from Reykjavic to Paris was uneventful due to the fact that by that time, after having already spent over twelve hours on planes, walked through three airports, and been awake for roughly 22 to 80 hours, I was dead. But couldn't sleep. And was trapped in the middle seat by my sleeping mom. You do the math.

So on the way to the taxi cue, some guy says, "Need a taxi?" and we say, "Yes" and he says, "Follow me," so we do, even though he's obviously not taking us to the cue, and when we get to his car, it has no "TAXI" sign on top, and at this point, I've figured out that he's not a real taxi driver, just some guy, and the whole time I'm looking at my mom for confirmation that she wants to keep following the guy and actually wants to get in his car and pay him and trust that he'll really take us to our hotel and not to some seedy section of town and kill us, and she's just kind of going with it, so I do too, against my better judgement, and fifty bucks later, we're at our hotel safe and sound. I don't recommend this method, though. It was scary.

Since we weren't driving or renting a car, I can't go into the detail about cars or street signs that Sam did in his tales of New Zealand. There was one sign, however, worth mentioning: apparently, if you do what this sign says not to do, your car will explode. It was a sign, usually paired with another showing not to turn left or something like that, with the bottom half of a car as viewed from behind (or in front, I suppose) but instead of having a top of the car, there is a red blast of some sort, kind of like a "Zowie!" frame on Batman. Our driver didn't make the car blow up, to my knowledge.

So then we get to our hotel, and due to some mix up with the reservation, the suite I thought we were getting isn't available right away, but they can put us in two separate rooms on two separate floors for the first two nights. Probably not a bad idea, since what we both really want is sleep. At the same time, I did not go on a vacation with my mom and book a suite so that we'd only see each other when we were doing something or going somewhere, neither of which we had planned for the first few days. Then they show us to the first room. It's roughly 8x8. Feet, I'm talking. A twin bed, a desk, and a tv, and room for little else, including me and my suitcase. But it had FRENCH DOORS. Those people have some strange priorities. I offer to take this room, and we go up to my mom's. It wasn't much bigger, but it didn't have the overpowering, sickly sweet disinfectant smell mine did, nor was it right on the street with the traffic noise, so mom is fine with it. We rest for a few hours and go out in search of something to eat.

Just getting this far has exhausted me almost to the point I was that day. Stay tuned.