Day 1- Houston to Paris

Two weeks ago, our wonderful friend Danielle hopped on an airplane with our two children and accompanied them to Albuquerque to stay with Grandma and Grandpa for two weeks. I was really worried about how Robert would do on the plane. He can be quite temperamental so I just hoped and prayed he would cooperate for Danielle. Well, thankfully he and Clara both did great! And both were wonderful for Grandma and Grandpa too. Linda updated her blog daily so we could see how they were doing. One of the highlights of my day was getting online just long enough to read what she had posted the night before and seeing how my babies were doing.

The next morning (Monday), Chris went into work for a couple of hours and I loaded up Zoe and Max and dropped them off at Nate and Crystal's house. After successfully getting all the little ones where they needed to be, Chris and I headed off to Europe that afternoon. We were using Chris' frequent flyer miles so we flew business class, which was quite nice if I must say so myself. Lots of leg room, seats that lie almost flat, 5 course meals, what's not to like? We left Houston at 4:00 pm on Monday and after a layover in Frankfurt, we got to Paris around 1:00 pm on Tuesday. It was a long day. Despite the luxury accommodations, I didn't sleep very well on the airplane.

Forgive the absurd number of self-portraits that will appear over the next few posts. We're typically not self-portrait kind of people, so we had to force ourselves to take them so as to have some pictures of the two of us. We're not very good at it either, you're sure to notice.


We went to our hotel which was very close to the Arc de Triomphe. Our room was teeny tiny, but nice and clean. The hotel was very charming and quite small. The front desk greeted us by name each time we came inside and handed us our key. An actual key. Crazy. We were both very impressed by the level of service we received at this hotel. This is the view of the "courtyard" from our window. The courtyard was as tiny as our room.

After dropping off our luggage, we went to a little restaurant around the corner and had a crash course in reading a menu in french and ordering our food with a waitress who spoke very, very little English. She spoke about as much English as we speak French. Luckily we both ended up with sandwiches that we actually enjoyed. That's what I call success!


We walked over to the Arc and then walked through the streets around our hotel for a bit before heading back to the hotel totally exhausted from our travels. We went to bed early, around 6:00, knowing we wouldn't sleep the whole night. We were both wide awake around midnight so we watched a movie and then back to sleep. We didn't wake until around 9:00! I could not believe we slept so long.