When my mother was a teenager in the late 1960s, she wanted to be an interpreter for the United Nations. She loved learning languages and, from what I’m told, was fairly fluent in French and Russian. She wanted to visit Paris and see the Mona Lisa and stand atop the Eiffel Tower. For the...
About a year ago, my mother decided it was time to finally visit Paris. She’s wanted to go since she was a kid, but life–as it often does–got in the way. She retired last year and after much deliberation applied for her passport. And then she started hearing about the gilets...
Almost exactly a month before a fire damaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, Mr. Pretty and I sat on a concrete bench on one of those narrow pathways below the roads, on the bank of the Seine. We ate choux à la crème from Popelini, and I very specifically recall eating a choux filled with […]
So what does one do when you land in Paris without a real plan? I mean, we flew there on a whim after not being able to get to Mexico–there wasn’t a whole lot of real forethought involved. Luckily, I’ve been to Paris a few times before. I knew how to get from the Charles […]
I occasionally have super dumb ideas. Like that time I decided I could totally make it to Isla Mujeres, Mexico (flying through Cancun and a nonrev ticket) during Spring Break and Carnaval. Yeah, you know, like last week. It’s okay–you can laugh. I sure as hell did after all was said...
Let it be known that I’m not very good at beach vacations. Despite many summers spent on the Schuylkill River in a dragon boat here in Philadelphia, I remain ridiculously pale with a tendency toward burning to a crisp (even under five layers of extra strength sunscreen). There’s...
Not to boast, but I’m lucky. Not in that great “I’m a lucky charm” kind of a way–hell, my mother-in-law won’t let me stand within a 40-yard radius of her at a casino because I am decidedly unlucky in that capacity. Put me next to a slot machine, and...
I won’t lie: the first time I went to Paris, seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre was a very big deal to me. For most people I suspect that’s true. Even for folks who don’t know much about art, or have no real interest in art, getting a peep at the Mona Lisa is […]