Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Summer 2005 ... the UNRoadTrip!!
Yes, I'm going to Europe this summer. I know, I have already posted that I was planning a Southwest USA road trip this summer ... but that's on hold for now. Maybe for the summer of 2006 or 2007. What happened to that plan is this: One of my colleagues has, for several years now, been talking about renting a chateau in France for a couple weeks and splitting the price by renting out each bedroom. Well, due to other circumstances, she wasn't able to pull it together until this summer. But ... it is definitely happening this summer ... and I can't wait!! The cost of the bedroom will be much less than a week in a hotel anywhere else in Europe. And I'm going to expand on the opportunity to be in Europe with an unstructured schedule and extend the trip to a few weeks.
Here are my current ideas (in skeleton form):
- Fly from DC to Paris during the last week of June (that gives me about a week off after school is out).
- Spend a day or two wandering the banks of the Seine, taking a bunch of photographs of Paris, and seeing the Mona Lisa (because the first time I was in Paris, I was so young and stupid that I chose to go shopping the day that the rest of the group went to the Louvre. Well ... I'm not so young any more, so I would like to enjoy seeing the Mona Lisa and forget about shopping.)
- Rent a car in Paris and drive to the Southwest of France, specifically the Dordogne River Valley, near Bergerac.
- Spend a week enjoying my colleagues and the farmhouse (when you click on the link, it's the picture nearest to the top of the page ... it's technically a "farmhouse", but it's still in the chateau network) and exploring the land: seeing the pre-historic cave paintings at Lascaux, tasting some wines and cognac, enjoying the steep cliffs along the banks of the Dordogne River ... and so on!
- Drive back to Paris, return the rental car, and either take the train through the Channel-Tunnel (the "Chunnel") or take a train-ferry-train route to London. On the way, possible stops that I'd like to see are the beaches at Normandy and the white cliffs of Dover (I've been enthralled with the idea of the chalk cliffs at Dover since I was a little girl and my mom would sing that song with us: "There'll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow ... just you wait and see.....")
- Spend a week in London (using the Underground, aka "The Tube", as I have no desire to re-learn how to shift gears in a car or to drive on the other side of the street). I've never been to London, so I want to see the standard tourist-y things, as well as the Oxford University campus, the new London City Hall, and so on. Oh - and the newest Harry Potter book will come out while I'm in London, so I'll probably pick up the British version of it while I'm there!! :-)
- Make my way back to the mainland, eventually ending up in Copenhagen. I was in Scandanavia about 21 years ago and remember simply falling in love with it, especially Denmark. I'll hopefully rent a car in Denmark and spend the better part of a week meandering the Danish countryside, especially a small seaside village called Skagen. Possibly take a ferry over to Sweden and/or Norway.
- Finally, making my way back (via train?) to Paris and my flight back to DC (I'm hoping to find (and afford) an "open" return ticket so that my plans can be more flexible. I'm not good with travel that's been planned to the day!!)
- Spend about a WEEK sound asleep, seeing as my jet lag is ALWAYS worse when I travel west.
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