This much.
We've finally booked our apartment in Paris, so if you were on the edge of your seat since the previous blog post (ha!) then that's all settled now. We found a place in Montparnasse just off the Rue Daguerre, which is a foodie paradise, they say. Of course, a week later our friends found an apartment for their year in Paris, and it is clear on the other side of the city, in the Batignolles area. A 35 minute Metro ride away. Yikes. That's going to make logistics challenging, but I guess it just means we'll have to say, "Meet us at the Louvre (or closest patisserie thereto)!"
Many people have asked me how I've found our places to stay. Well, of course, I found them all on the Inter-tubes. More specifically, I found more than half of them on Booking.com. We've used them before with good success, and I like their UI for the most part. We did another chunk through FlipKey. At the suggestion of friends, I used AirBnB to find the elusive Paris apartment. (I thought they only did couch surfing, which I wasn't comfortable doing, but you have the option of looking for whole apartments/houses.) And the one fancy hotel (in Carcassonne) I booked directly. One thing I learned was that I could often find the same place on multiple sites, and that way sometimes get more pictures, more reviews, and sometimes different prices as well. Google Street View was also a great help in separating the wheat from the chaff. We had some specific needs that helped concentrate the hunt:
Take all those requirements, add a dash of serendipity, throw in apartment owners whose vacancies may not coincide with the calendar shown on their web page, and you get many many many hours of searching to find 110 nights worth of lodging. I could write a book. Oh look, I just did. I've spent about a year planning this trip in my spare time. I'm not trying to have every moment planned out, just to make sure we have places to sleep and anything that needs to be reserved in advance (flights, ferries, special tickets like the Ceremony of the Keys). Now, pretty much everything is planned.
Now, when I sit down at the computer to "work on the trip," all that's left to do is execute my To Do list. Well, that's not so much fun! But, we're down to 45 days to go (!), so now all those details like "What are we doing with our cars?" have to get squared away. Since the beginning of July, we've been spending every weekend deep cleaning the house. It is amazing how much crud a family accumulates, and it feels really great to rid ourselves of some of it. A few charities send trucks through the neighborhood, so we've been able to donate our usable castoffs with almost no effort on our part. I am learning to let go of the "maybe someday" stuff. Someone will love those beautiful brown ankle boots that hurt my toes.... Plus, we're finding some lost treasures, such as Luigi's sun-blocking swim shirt, which would have been nice to have last week when he got his first ever nasty sunburn. One thing that is really making our lives easier is that since our renters don't need our 4th bedroom, they agreed we could use it for storage. So, it's starting to pile up with boxes of things we don't want to leave out. Luigi and Columbia have very sweetly thought about stuff that the renter kids might like to have available; they know they can't leave anything they'd be upset to lose or be damaged. So, the renter kids will get a set of Magic Treehouse paperbacks and some not-precious stuffed animals. I've been pleased with how un-territorial the kids have been about strange kids using their rooms. They got to meet and play with the renters' young boys, so that helped, I think. Wesley went to the doctor for a pre-trip checkup and the shots we adults need for Croatia (tetanus and Hep A, according to the CDC). But, they forgot to do the shots. Oops. Back to the doc. Maybe we'll go together, since I haven't gotten mine yet either. In 2 months we'll be visiting the Queen at Buckingham Palace! But today, we've just signed the lease on our house and we're feeling good. The family who will rent our house while we're gone seem very nice, and we really lucked out with dates that work perfectly for both us and them. I enjoyed checking "rent out house" off my to do list, and Wesley will enjoy depositing the rent check! :-)
Our friends in Paris have let us know that they're not so confident they'll have a place big enough for us in September, so I've been scouring the Internet for rentals. Trying to find a place configured so that I can work without disturbing the rest of the family, that is in a convenient location, and that doesn't blow the budget has been challenging, to say the least. Since we don't know where in Paris our friends will end up finding their apartment, it's a bit nerve-wracking. I hope they call tonight to say they've found an 8-room palace on the Champs Elysees..... We've got a long pre-trip To Do list, and suddenly all those things that were too early to do a month ago now seem quite urgent. But, apparently I've found time to blog. (Procrastination, anyone?) |
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January 2014
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