The first of our first international trips for Sharon and I, back in 1992. The original concept was to fly into Paris and out of Rome 17 days later and not worry about any arrangements in between. Sharon had high school French, which was a little helpful. I was between assignments and had already spent a couple of days driving cross-county from Louisiana to Maryland. Email was just becoming used widely in my company but the concept of having to check email while on vacation had not arrived yet – so it was truly leave work, no contact, and show up in a new place with basically a new job 21 days later. In the final arrangements we ended up flying into Paris, overnight train to Zurich where we rented a car to drive to tour Northern Italy and back to Zurich where we flew home. I don’t remember why Zurich…must have been cheapest. We had to use a phone and travel books to make the arrangements, Rick Steves was a must.
Paris
Landing in Paris, we stuck with the plan of no advance hotel and took the cheapest transport into the city and after a while we did find us a 2 star hotel that had a shower down the hall but a toilet in the room so that was a nice compromise we stayed there a couple days. We visited all the major sites. We had a combination of pictures and video and we do have hours of video (which helped with recollection). But picture much more useful now but as you remember rictures in 1992 were much more complicated as you actually had to have film and get them developed.
We took a hop on / hop off bus the first day and went to Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower with sunset at a Sacre-Coeur. We spent a day at the Louvre as well. We did quite a bit exploring by Metro and found out the hard way that there was actually 2 Metro systems and when we were going to Versailles which I remember being a bit frustrating of not being able to find the train when we were actually on the wrong system anyway. Once we found it the train went the opposite way than we expected, but we eventually got to Versailles. I took a trip on my own to La Defense, which was state of the art at the time.
I think we stayed about five days and then we took an overnight trip to Zurich on the train where we rented a car and headed straight to Italy. Below are some pictures from Versailles
Versailles
Switzerland
After going to Italy, we headed back to Switzerland driving through the Alps. Bad weather and not a lot of pictures.
We stopped in Bellinzona for the night and Lucerne the next day and walked around the old city a bit before taking a flight back out of Zurich.
(This was written during the Great Shutdown of 2020. My memory isn’t this good, used internet searches to fill in a lot of holes. If there’s huge fat foot below me, it not my fault – that an advertisement I can’t control).
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