Please excuse the self-indulgence, but I’m going to chronicle my recent trip through France here so I can remember it. I very optimistically brought a small notebook in the hopes of journalling during the trip, but unlike my undergraduate self I failed to open it.
Here’s my biggest tip for going on a most excellent vacation: the appropriate amount of planning. You’d be surprised at how much money a little planning will save you, and knowing this I planted the seed for this trip as much as one year before we took off. In fact, I’d planned the next two and a half years of my life around it. My company didn’t allow enough time off for me to enjoy France the way I wanted (and to make the $1,500 plane ticket worth it!), so I decided to quit. And, well, without any offers lined up, grad school seemed like a good choice to occupy my time when I returned. Well, ok, maybe this trip was just a convenient excuse to kick my butt into action, but… it sounds more interesting the first way.
Why did I want to go to France so badly that I changed my entire life to accommodate it? After spending a semester abroad in France in 2006, I fell into an nine-way love nonagon. France was everything I had dreamed of since starting French classes in 7th grade. When traveling to the places I’d read so much about (Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Monet’s garden paradise in Giverny, William the Conqueror’s (thigh’s) grave in Caen), I had many an out-of-body experience as some part of me took a step back, saw me standing there in the shadows of history, and whispered in awe, “I never thought we would actually be here.”
I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower for the first time and remembered very clearly my senior-year of high school trip to Las Vegas, where I rode the elevator up the 1/4th model of this tower at the Paris hotel thinking that this was as close to the real thing as I would ever get. Being able to touch the real thing now, I proved myself wrong. I looked that doubtful part of me straight in the eye–that part that beat me down, that shattered my dreams and poked holes in every uplifting thought I ever had–and told it to kindly go f%#k itself. In French. Because according to this photographic evidence, not only did I accomplish my dream of coming to France by myself to stand before the Eiffel Tower, I climbed the side of that beast like an American King Kong in Paris.
Part of–most of–what made my semester abroad so amazing and forever golden in my memory was the seven friends I met in our crappy little dormitory in Rouen. These people were so open, so willing to accept me and all my weird and sarcastic moments, so genuinely kind-hearted and funny and smart as hell, I couldn’t believe my luck in finding them. No one really remembers at what moment we came together, but we were inseparable through all our large trips during that semester. The other kids were jealous of our ability to never fight (ok, there was that ONE time in Nice, but God we’d been around each other for so long) and our ability to always settle the check. Eight ways.
So that’s my nonagon of love, seven awesome friends, France and myself. Four years after my study abroad experience, I had decided it was time for us all to meet up. My group had reunited three times since the end of our trip on ’06, but we needed our ninth. We needed France.
Once I planted that seed, one by one my friends caved in. Everyone requested time off for the following July, and to even my optimistic surprise, all eight of us committed financially. Along with six new friends and lovers. A cozy group of 14 would be spending one week in Paris together! We bought our tickets and booked our accommodations in February, and for the group of five who were staying an extra week before Paris, we booked our other hotels and rail passes in advance–by spreading out our costs over a few months, it made each purchase more bearable. I certainly couldn’t have afforded such a long trip if we’d bought everything the month before. Especially as I planned to end my time as a contributing member of society (and contributing member of my household income).
Note that I said the appropriate amount of planning. My suggestion is to make sure you have a place to sleep each night, know how you’re going to get there (book that in advance too if you can), and if there’s an activity or place you would regret missing, then book that as well. But you can definitely over-plan, and there’s a lot to be said for flexibility. If you plan every moment of your trip, you’ll just be thinking about what you need to do next rather than enjoying where you are. Plus you really should leave ample time for naps. Naps are key.
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