LH Franz Finally! We turn to the fun part. What to do as tourists in the big city!
Her mother’s daughter, my child is, like me, something of a museum-nut. No question, then, that we would visit the Louvre. The place is huger than huge. You could not do it justice in one day’s visit. If you live in Paris, you can go back to visit parts of it over time. If you’re limited to one week, as we were, you have to take a more selective approach. Another consideration is that my daughter spent a summer in Paris when she was a university student, where, she told me, she visited the Louvre many times. “Practically lived there” was the way she put it. Since it all would be new to me, I deferred to her and let her decide what to explore. I’m excited to just be there, regardless of specific exhibits, and I’m not overly interested in seeing the Mona Lisa, one painting everyone thinks of in connection with the Louvre.
Another factor for our trip is that Betsy said she wanted to get out of the city once or twice. She was able to do this during the summer she was there, and raves about how beautiful the countryside is. Specifically, she wanted to see some castles and do some wine tasting. Along those lines, the only landmark outside of Paris I was interested in is Versailles.
Assuming our planes arrive on time, we can count on having Sunday afternoon for touring. That gave us the rest of the week to plan out. It didn’t sound like much. Even as we were planning this trip, I was already considering a second trip just to visit what we would miss this time around. A tentative day-to-day schedule emerged.
Then, two weeks before we were ready to leave, my husband came into the kitchen while I was chopping vegetables and announced he had made plane reservations to go to Paris with us. He also made a reservation in the hotel we were staying. Then he returned to his favorite chair to read Twitter posts on his tablet.
Now, although this was kind of sudden, it did not phase me very much. By that time, we’d been married for forty-three years. We’d by then tacitly agreed that as long as a decision wasn’t completely disruptive of other things going on, there was no shame in changing one’s mind. Clearly, my husband had been considering coming along on our mother-daughter trip but had refrained from imposing himself. Eventually, I guess, he decided he really wanted to visit Paris after all. I told him he was welcome to join us. If there was something he wanted to do that did not interest us, he could do it on his own. We would not change our own plans. This sounded reasonable to him.
He had tried to get a seat on the same flight as me but it was filled up. He booked a flight arriving on Monday, one day after us. Betsy and I adjusted our schedule slightly and moved a couple of things we knew Dad wouldn’t enjoy to Monday, when he would be spending the day in transit.
