Meet Me in Paris

Wow, it's been awhile since I last posted, but after writing about our trip to Andalusia, everything that we have done since we've been back does not seem worthy of blogging about.  Now I am just looking forward to our next trip, which will be Paris in April!

When we were in Vancouver over the summer, Bob was talking to my dad about meeting up in Paris in the Spring.  I honestly didn't think that it was going to happen, but my dad was serious about it and right after Christmas he booked flights for himself and mom to Paris on April 1st.

I lived in Paris with my family from 1984 to 1987.  My dad at the time was working in the ministry of finance for the Canadian government and he got a 3 year posting to work for the OECD which was headquartered in Paris.  I have never been back to Paris since, and neither have my parents.  Since I have a terrible memory (long and short term) I am really looking forward to rediscovering the city that I have almost no recollection of and showing my children where I spent my pre-teen years.

So I had to quickly find some flights for us to go to Paris on April 1st.  Inter-Europe flights are pretty cheap compared with flights within Canada.  I found a flight through Ryanair, a discount Irish airline, for €32.99 one way.  Compare that with a flight from Toronto to Vancouver which would cost at least €200 during the same time.  All 6 of us are going to Paris and back to Barcelona for only €395.  It was a few days after booking that Bob casually asked me which airport we were flying into.  I had no idea, I hadn't even checked before I booked.  It was then that I found out one of the reasons why our flight was so cheap.  Ryanair doesn't fly into Paris-Charles de Gaulle, we are flying into the airport Paris-Beauvais, which is actually over an hour outside of Paris by bus.  So not included in our flight is the €16 per person shuttle bus that will take us from Beauvais to Paris.   Anyways, hopefully it won't end up being too much of an inconvenience.

Then it was time to find reasonable accommodations for 8 people in Paris.  This was definitely not an easy task.  I checked with www.homeaway.com which is my favourite websites for finding vacation rentals in Spain.  There were some nice listings in Paris, but none were available.  I checked www.booking.com,   www.onefinestay.com, www.housetrip.com, www.flipkey.com, and www.airbnb.com.  I quickly realized that there are way too many vacation rental websites, but when your search parameter is an apartment for 8 people in downtown Paris, the number of places available quickly diminishes.

Finally found a small two bedroom apartment in Boulogne Billancourt through Airbnb which is close to where we used to live (Neuilly sur Seine).  So now at least the most important components of our trip are set and we have 2 more months to figure out the rest.