The Women of Paris

I love people watching.  The amazingly coiffed, perfumed, hosed, and made up older women in Paris were fascinating to me.  And the occasional man.  But the women!  I took pictures sneakily whenever I could.

Fort William, Scotland

I wanted to say a bit more about this lovely town.  This was a very quaint town that my stepdaughter knew about from one of her old Vine connections.  We were able to rent a real house, upstairs and downstairs with three full bedrooms and two bathrooms.  It had a fully usable kitchen and a comfy living room to hang out in.  Up on a fairly steep hill from the nearby Loch, though.  We walked down to the grocery and the Main street for shopping, and then took taxis home most of the time.

Fort William is a great little town, with lovely shops, the nearby Loch/Lake, and it serves as a jumping off point for summer "tramps" or hikes through the Scottish Highlands.  It's a wet, lush, green place with brilliant blue skies and about five different types of rain.   You get your misty, your foggy, your regular, the big drops, and sideways with wind.  That raincoat from Eastbourne, UK came in very, very handy.

When it's raining, and you're shopping, it's hard to hold packages as well as an umbrella, but we did have plenty of those as well, mostly because of the baby in the stroller.  Even in his raincoat, sitting in the stroller could get pretty wet.

One day we rented a car and drove the 1.5 hours up to Loch Ness, to say we'd been there.  It's close to Inverness, which was a nice shopping area where we picked up some hats, scarves and gloves.

TV or not to TV

While we were in Europe, many of our Airbnb's did not have a TV, so we fell WAY behind in our standard TV watching.  Some of our shows were available on Netflix, or Hulu, or Amazon Prime, but some were not.  The hubs had a Virtual Private Network (VPN) set up that allowed us to stream everything we wanted, so it ended up working out well.  But many shows don't air in European countries on your regular set up.

We would throw the windows tablet/notebook over the back of a chair and sit very close together and watch Dr. Who and Game of Thrones together.  Everything else, we watched separately.  My theory is that we like chatting about those two shows afterwards, so viewing them together was a priority.

One thing I loved about Romania at 2PM was that the sounds of the "Friends" theme that would come through the open windows.  Somebody in our building watched it every single day:)  It's everywhere folks!

Our Budapest host had a really nice, big TV, and an HDMI port so we could watch with our stick, and I can't remember if we bought a Google or Amazon stick in the electronics store in London.  Hmmm.  Either way, it was great to see our shows on a big screen again.  Anyway, I highly recommend having one of those if you're over there for very long, it came in quite handy.

Paris, lovely Paris.

We stayed the first night near the airport, the kids were leaving early the next morning.  The kiddo caught something and spiked a fever again, so Poppa and I hiked into the CDG to the one pharmacy and darn near hit our 10,000 steps just picking up iboprofen and tylenol for the bambino.  The Hilton at CDG has great AC and great beds.  The breakfast was ok, not great for the price.  The staff was French and very curt.  The reason we were at Hilton is that the staff at Ibis CDG were very rude the last time we stayed, which was when the kids flew in three weeks ago.  "You Americans like your AC too cold", which translates to us as "You Americans should never stay at Ibis again".  We obliged them and chose Hilton.

After the kids left, we debated what we were going to do for two weeks.  And we decided to move our departure up a week.  I just want to go home to Denver now:)  The future we are living into is our lovely downtown apartment, next to Union Station, the Farmers Market, the train to the airport, and above the flagship, new Whole Foods.  I am ready to return for now.  I will go to London with my son later this year, to Tucson for my 40th high school reunion, and to Memphis to visit the grandson and daughter.  Other than that, we are back home for the duration!

London Towne!

London was fantastic, we took the kids to see some of the normal sights, Trafalgar Square, London Bridge, The Tower of London, Crown Jewels and San Pancras's lovely statues and train station.  Took the Chunnel to Paris after this!  The airbnb had a great little library with a park for the grandbaby to collect germs in.  He sprouted a fever about 24 hours later, but enjoyed playing!  Sticky Toffee Pudding, Steak and Ale Pies and Windsor Castle rounded out our stay.