What Does 7 minus 5 equal?

That is the number of good days we had in our most recent trip to Paris.

I know many of you enjoy my travel posts about our recent trips to Paris and France. This trip was meant to be even more special as a celebration of my ‘big’ birthday. However it turned out not to be so.

So no long blog posts filled with delight, recommendations and experiences. Here is the condensed version which is simply an ode to life happens on the travelling road:

The first plane is delayed due to weather so we missed our connecting flight to Paris. We spent almost five hours in the Atlanta airport. What made this more unpleasant was the fact that we experienced horrible turbulence on the flight from Charlotte that caused half the plane to throw up including my poor husband. The pilot tried to land 3 times before we finally hit the ground. Our seat mate commented that in his over 50 years of flying for work, he had never experienced turbulence like this. Lucky us!

We finally arrived and missed most of our first day in Paris. We did go out in the bitter cold to get a bite to eat. We decided we were too tired to figure out what to do so we walkd up the street to eat at Schwartz’s Deli for a great hamburger. In Paris, people order their burgers very rare/almost raw and eat it with a knife and fork. We went for the well done version though ate it like a Parisan. Afterwards we walked around Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile and the very touristyAvenue des Champs-Élysées.

On our first full day in Paris, I had my very own Parisian haircut and we enjoyed a bit of shopping in Le Marais and the had best croissants. Can you have a bad croissant in Paris?

Our second day included a visit to the Musée Nissim de Camondo which which is in an elegant house museum of French decorative arts located in the Hôtel Camondo. This was followed by ‘delicious’ roasted chicken and potatoes purchased as the local market. We then ventured out in the bitter cold for a walk around The Trocadéro.

the-view-from-the-bed — Our View From The Bed

Then the world as we knew it stopped. Both Mark and I got food poisoning from that ‘delicious’ chicken. We had purchased food from this market on a previous visit and did not have any problems. This time was different – 24 hours of hell!

Afterwards, we hardly ate. When we regained some strength, we were able to muster enough energy to visit The Musée d’Orsay and The Musée de l’Orangerie on separate days. As you can see, we looked pretty good after the hell storm.