I was notified in May that the site I have used for almost 10 years to create travel blogs, was shutting down. I was a little devastated as I had 15 blogs on the site, lots of photos and lots of memories. I was thrilled to hear that a former user of Travelpod created this site, TravelArk, and wanted to make it similar. I was able to transfer all of my blogs and photos to this site and not lose them! 

Let's get on to the new trip. My niece/goddaughter, Mary, is 10 years old, and has been obsessed with Paris for a few years. A year ago, she had the opportunity to go to Italy with friends of their family. They decided not to send her because it would've been for two weeks, and that is a decent amount of time for a young child to be away from home. So, last summer, on our family vacation, Mary says to me, "Mom said you will take me to France next year."  Oh, really?!? Hahaha. 

We've been talking about this trip and thought it might happen in Spring 2018, but the more I thought about it, it seemed better to connect the trip with their visit to Wisconsin (they live in Omaha). That way, it would be easy to get us both to the airport, and we wouldn't have to find a way to meet. So after we meet at Beach Harbor, Mary will stay in Wisconsin with me and a day later we will head to Paris. We found a reasonable flight for flying to Paris in the summer, and we decided to take the plunge. 

The plan is to fly into Paris and spend three nights there.  Then, we will take the train to the smaller, cute town of Colmar, in the eastern part of France. We will spend three nights here and do a day trip to Basel, Switzerland. Then we will take the train back to Paris the night before take off. We have tickets to visit the Eiffel Tower, to take a cruise on the Seine, and to do a bike tour in Paris. We also plan to visit the castle in Versailles. Clearly, three days is not enough to see everything in Paris, so we have to pick and choose. 

I am relying on Mary to know some basic French to get us by. After all, I have to do the planning. We are very excited, and she received her passport last week. Take off is in 4 weeks, and we can't wait! 

-Jamie