Paris

Paris, like Zurich is one of our favorite cities. A visit there can be expensive, but it is worth the trip. We first visited Paris as our second post-destination stopover after our Rhine River Cruise with Viking River Cruises. Our first post-cruise destination was Amsterdam. This was our first river cruise and the beginning of doing more river cruises in Europe. You can read more about our first visit to Paris in the Paris Blog Post. I forgot to mention that we were also celebrating our 20 year anniversary and where better than in Paris.

Since we don’t really like flying half way around the world for a one week trip, we added Zurich as a pre-cruise trip and followed up with Amsterdam and Paris for post-cruise trips. We even managed a side trip to Brussels before taking the high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris. We learned a lot from this trip. It was the first real trip, not counting a Panama Canal Cruise, where we discovered the need to pack light. We carried two large checked bags, two carry on bags and two personal bags. This trip resulted in the writing of quite a few pages and blog posts about packing light. In fact, it lead to my writing a post to give you, my visitors, a plan of action to test out your ability to travel, European Style, before you leave home for the big trip. Read my Taking a Test Run on Your European Vacation.

Regardless of where you live, you need to try out a local trip before you venture out on a huge, and expensive, European vacation. Most of us Americans don’t really utilize public transportation unless we live in larger metropolitan areas like LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, NYC, etc… So, if you live in the suburbs or even further out in the country where you live with a car everyday, plan your test run to the big city close to you. You will thank me and yourself when you take the real trip without the heavy checked bags.

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That first trip was so much fun that when we went through Europe on our way home from South Africa, we planned it with an overnight stopover in Paris. The friends travelling with us had not visited Europe so we treated them to a day trip into Zurich on the way to South Africa, to be followed with an overnight stopover in Paris on the way home. You can read about that overnight stopover here Paris Revisited. Did you know that you can pick the cities you visit enroute to your destination city? It was not by accident that we stopped in Zurich and Paris on our trip to and from South Africa. Talk to your travel agent about places you want to visit on your way to or from your ultimate destination. It breaks up the long flights, gives you a chance to stretch your legs, gives you time to get over jetlag before you get to your final destination. If you only have a week of vacation, then maybe you want to travel closer to home, maybe with only a 5-6 hour flight. Plan the big trips when you can be on vacation for two or three weeks, especially if there is a European River Cruise or Med cruise in the middle of the trip.

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As you may already know from other pages on this website, I like to study a country that I am visiting by looking online at various videos so that I know what to expect. Below are some of the videos that we viewed before our trip. Check them out so that you won’t feel lost on your first trip to Paris.