A Blue Door in FranceSidetracked Sisters

cruise Traveling abroad was never on my bucket list. There are so many places in the U.S. that I have not seen.

Then several years later I was asked to go to France with my oldest daughter’s mother-in-law. The timing was right, and it felt good to have something exciting to plan and look forward to. We took a Viking River Cruise in France.

For me, the absolute highlight of this trip was a planned excursion to Paris. It was fascinating touring the city. It’s a whole different world than what we were used to. First of all, we didn’t speak French. That always makes things interesting especially at one point when we got lost and had to find our way back to our group of tourists. Getting lost in a city where no one speaks English, and the streets seem to have no sense of direction, created a bit of hysteria for us. We left a park and were told to return at a certain time. Unfortunately, we did not remember or take a picture of the sign naming the park, and trying to find our way back was nearly impossible. The only form of identification I had of the park was a picture of a cool blue door that was in the park. I felt that was more fun than taking a picture of a stupid sign. We started asking people who did not speak English where this park was to no avail, proceeded to try to backtrack our steps and when we finally located the park after an extensive search, our group had left. If you did not get back to the ship on its scheduled take-off time you were sol. It would leave without you. We were lucky to find another group that we recognized from our ship and hooked with up them. What a relief that was.

cruise While in Paris it was noted that at least one-third of the transportation is done on little scooters. This looked really dangerous as there was a lot of traffic. I also noticed that the parks are usually quite busy with people as they live in rather cramped quarters and this creates people wanting to get outside. We saw a family moving and in order to accomplish this ladders had to be brought up to their apartment and things brought out of windows. This is because the buildings are usually attached, are several stories high, and furniture would the stairways are very narrow. This results in having to take things out of windows and taken down to a moving van by way of a ladder.

Two of our favorite parts of our touring were seeing Notre Dame and the Eifel Tower. Something that was very cool is at ten o’clock every night the Eifel Tower is lit up and sparkles for a period of time. Who knew??

But, my absolute favorite part of that trip was when we went to a cabaret performance. This was truly the most fabulous thing I have ever seen. The show itself went on for approximately three hours. To start off with there was singing to music that was absolutely beautiful, and then we ate a very elegant meal. After our meal, the magic really began. The songs, performances, and dancing were out of this world.

Looking forward to another fantastic adventure.