London and Paris Getaway

Our first big trip after a year of recouperating from our honeymoon expenses was to London and Paris for ten days in September 2002. It was both of our first times to London and Andrew's first time to Paris; I had been there twice in the past while in school. We were in each city for four nights and of this time spent one entire day out of town on a daytrip in each place.

First we went to Paris and instantly fell in love with the french way of life, particularly their food! We ate in some wonderful restaurants and also had just as much gastronomical delight at the nightly crepe and panini stands. Wow, we never knew that "fast food" could be this fresh and good until we were walking the streets of La Grande Paris par la nuit chowing down on banana and Nutella filled crepes! In fact, this experience was so memorable for us that we actually bought ourselves a bona fide french crepe maker (and I mean "the real deal." None of those stove-top pans that are sold under the name of crepe maker) for one of our anniversaries after this trip.

Here we are dressed to the nines as we headed out one night:


A few scenic photos of the city. It's amazing how beautiful a steel structure can look when lit up at night.



Here is the Jardin et Palais du Luxembourg, which was located a few blocks from our hotel. It was a scenic garden in which we enjoyed walking around and picknicking.

Here's one of the highlights in my book, the Opera Garnier, which is otherwise known as the famous Paris Opera House in the Phantom of the Opera play, a favorite of mine. We toured the inside of the building and saw the chandelier that falls on the audience during the famous play. One memory I will always have of touring the opera house on this particular trip is that amongst all of the french language being spoken, we heard a couple speaking english and asked them to take our photo for us. It turns out that they were from Allentown, PA. What a small world!

Below is a photo of the Arc de Triomphe and also a shot of me ascending the famous arc. We must have walked a few miles in stairs during this trip since every attraction seemed to come complete with numerous flights of narrow, winding steps!

Finally, here are two pictures of Andrew, one of them atop the Catedral de Notre Dame and the other one in front of the Louvre museum. Poor Andrew woke up one morning with an awful cold but because we were in Europe and on vacation he didn't want that to put a damper on our trip. So, I reached into the back of my brain, pulled out my old high school french and we succeeded in getting him some medicine that helped him to feel well enough to go out for the day. Poor guy!

Our daytrip while we were in France was to Versailles to see the famous palace. We had a spectacular day and truly loved seeing the palace, the grounds, and the town of Versailles. It's hard to imagine just how large Versailles Palace is, but this photo had to be taken in three parts and then pieced together in order to view the entire panorama. It's spectacular!

For the remainder of our trip, the Martins took on London, and what a wonderful time we had there. Below are just a handful of our favorite photos.

Here I am with one of London's notorious red phone booths. The only thing more fun to see than the phone booths were the bright red double decker buses!

Here's a scenic picture of Big Ben and Parliament. We took a boat tour on the Thames and got to enjoy all of London's best architectural sights via water.

I don't have any photos, but we had yet another coincidence while we were in London that rivals our meeting an Allentown, PA couple in Paris. While we were touring Westminster Abbey on our own in London, we turned around and out next door neighbor, Adrian, was standing next to us using the Rick Steves travel guide that we were also using to guide ourselves. We didn't even know that the other was travling to London so that made it even more of a coincidence!

Our daytrip while in England was to Windsor, home of the famous Windsor Castle, the royal residence for part of every year. Here's Andrew with the castle and then there is me pictured with another highlight of Britain - the beefeaters! In case you can't tell because the photo is quite small, this shifty guy is either really on guard and thinks I'm suspicious looking so he needs to be extra cautious around me or he is checking me out. We were laughing so hard when we first looked at our photos and saw that I was clearly being eye-balled!