How’s this for a travel show’s recommendation for someplace to visit: “one of France’s best-preserved medieval towns” that was followed by scenes of half-timbered buildings, ivy-covered stone walls, meandering cobblestone streets, and a towering 12th-century cathedral. Based on that, it was an easy decision to book the train tickets to go to Bourges while we were in the area, having stayed about an hour away in Orléans after a wedding in Paris. The description came from the France TV 5 program called “Les 100 lieux qu’il faut voir” that we would translate as—and agree with—”The 100 Places that you must see”. 

Continue reading “Bourges in 1 day”

New Orleans, Louisiana is a favorite US city for us. It’s one of the few places in America where you can walk out of a bar in the French Quarter with a “go-cup” (a plastic cup containing an alcoholic beverage) and not get arrested. The nonchalant atmosphere of the Big Easy gives you a sense of freedom not found in a lot of other locations around the country. With that as a background, we wondered what the original Orléans would be like so we returned to the city where, almost 9 years ago, we spent our first night as permanent residents of France.

Continue reading “The not-so-new Orléans”

Typically we would be writing about taking the train to a vacation destination, especially in France, but today it’s about travel on the Canal de la Marne du Rhine from Lagarde to a city we’ve visited several times, Strasbourg. Two of the times that we’ve been there were in December to experience the colorful holiday atmosphere when it truly earns the nickname, “Capital of Christmas”. This time, however, it was only last week when we were gliding past this Alsatian city’s familiar sites aboard a 22-passenger péniche, a canal hotel barge identical to the ones we cruised with on other French canals.

Continue reading “Sailing to Strasbourg”

This past spring we were on a repositioning cruise of a passenger ship that operates in the south of Spain during the winter and moves up to the Azur coast of France for summer trips to Corsica. We disembarked in Nice and instead of heading directly home we spent a few days there to explore a couple of the destinations that were on our must-see list. The local trains in that area offer an all-day pass for 25€ for the two of us—roundtrip tickets for one city alone would have been 60€—so it was time to discover another part of the country and do it at a bargain price.

Continue reading “Two day trips from Nice”