France and Belgium - Part One

I've been putting off putting up pictures of my trip because of this blogger. She's one of my daily readers and about the same time that I went on my trip she took a hiking trip to Mt. Everest Base Camp. Upon returning she did a daily recap of her days hiking. I suddenly got very envious of her graphic designed blog recap of her trip. This morning it hit me, I'm not a graphic designer. Why am I holding back sharing my trip? Don't get me wrong! Her trip recap was fantastic but it was done in a style that is her own. So why should I try to come up with something like hers. Anyways, I'm not going to but if you have a few free moments please check out her trip here.

Leaving LA - We took a red eye out on Wednesday 27th. Let me tell you that packing for two weeks in a place you've never been is really hard. All the advice I was told is bring everything! Paris is really unpredictable and it can be gorgeous and sunny and cold rainy all within the same day! So we brought coats, lots of sweaters, jeans, a few different pairs of shoes and lots of jewelry. In the rush of getting to the airport and getting everything there we forgot to eat so we ponied up to some awful Mexican restaurant in the international terminal and had nacho's, margaritas and coronas. What a way to leave LA!

Nothing like a good old fashioned margarita before leaving!

or some trashy awful airport nachos!

We boarded Air France on time and to my surprise they had shifted our tickets and we were in the last row and in a four seat side vs the two seat side I had booked over seven months ago. I was pissed and in the future will NEVER book my tickets through travelocity. I'm convinced we got bumped because of that. AirFrance/Delta has classes A-U and U is the last class ( probably meaning you can get bumped at any time or for any reason). We were in U class which is also the last to board. Ugh.It wouldn't have been so bad but we bought our tickets in February to make sure we had good seats and good connections. Anyways, the trip was about 8 hours until we landed in Paris at Charles De Gaulle Airport. I remember being a little bit panicked when we arrived and all the signs were in French. Even the arrows faced different directions. It hit me. We were here and needed to make the best of it! I kinda of kicked myself for not brushing up more on my french before leaving.

I read a bunch of articles on how to get to/from the airport which is situated about 30 minutes outside of Paris. Some people claimed the metro was easy some claimed the taxi's were better. We felt unsure about if we had enough money so we opted for the train.


Proud ticket holder here! We've made it finally!

From the airport to Paris Central is about 15 euro's a person. We had to get off at Gare De L'est and change trains to take us into Paris. It probably took us an hour and half to actually get to the right stop but we finally made it to Paris!!