It’s official: after Kathy finished law school in April, we’ll be taking a celebratory vacation in France for 2-1/2 weeks in May. We have tickets from Edmonton to Paris departing on May 11 and returning on May 29. We haven’t gotten to do a lot of traveling while Kathy’s been in school, so we’re both pretty stoked to be headed back to Europe.
Booking wasn’t a great experience, unfortunately. We’ve been saving up our air miles in hopes of saving some money on this flight. Unfortunately, when we went to book, Air Miles wouldn’t offer us any single connection flights. They all involves at least 2 connections (Edmonto-Toronto-Frankfurt-Paris, or more ridiculously, Edmonton-Vancouver-Montreal-Paris), and several of the routes had cash prices – we only had enough points for one ticket – high enough that we’d be saving less than $200 to take those flights. So we ended up having to just bite the bullet and pay cash. We’re hoping to use the points that remain on a trip to Cuba next winter, but we’ll see how that goes.
The plan so far is intentionally vague. We’re planning to bring the bikes, and head straight from the airport to somewhere in the Loire valley, which is a famous bike trip, and part of the Eurovelo 6 cycle route that goes all the way from St. Nazaire on the French Atlantic coast to the Danube Delta on Romania’s black sea cost. I’m currently leaning towards Angers as a starting point for our trip, and then we’ll see how things go from there. The hope is to see a bit of rural France and have some time to relax. The route is advertised as using primarily low traffic roads and separated bike instrastructure, so I’m hoping it lives up to its promise. We’re not sure that we’ll only visit the Loire. There’s been talk of Provence, and Midi-Pyrenees, or maybe somewhere north of Paris – neither of us have much idea what there is north of Paris – but these aren’t the sorts of things we’re going to plan to obsession. If we want to go somewhere else, we will. If we’re enjoying the Loire, then there’s no reason to rush off just for the sake of something different.
It’s good to have a holiday to plan again. I always enjoy this part.