Paris, 2024 edition

I wrote a draft of this blog post on the flight back from Paris. My daughter (age 12) and I flew there Thursday night, got there Friday, and spent a lovely three days in town. The highlight? Seeing the Taylor Swift concert on Saturday.

A college friend of mine had suggested, back in January, that a few of us make this weekend trip with our daughters. I was intrigued, but then I had my back incident, and couldn’t walk for a week-plus. This did not bode well for a European tour! However, in early February, I was doing well enough that I decided I’d be able to manage it. I bought seats, made our hotel reservations, and then enjoyed being part of a group trip where others were even more of planners than I am!

(I didn’t think a lot of people would be making the same trip, but then I started seeing social media posts and articles this weekend about all the Americans in Paris seeing Taylor. There were definitely several on my flight over! There were enough on the flight back that the pilot made a joke about it. I think in some cases it was cheaper for people to buy tickets for the Paris show and fly over than to buy tickets in the US. That was not the case for me but I see how the economics could work…)

We packed a lot in. Friday night, several of us met for dinner and then did a boat cruise on the Seine. I took many pictures of the Eiffel Tower. On Saturday morning, we did a tour of the Rodin Museum (one I had not seen before!). We walked a lot, had some downtime, then got ready in loads of sparkles.

I had a purple sparkly jacket but was still the least sparkly of the group. We took the RER out to the stadium and waited in line to get in and find a spot on the floor.

Yes, we had floor tickets — where there were no seats, so we stood the whole time. Like from 6:30-11:15 (or whenever it was she finished). As someone with a bad back, this was not exactly great. Also, we couldn’t see all that well. Sometimes, like when she went up on a platform, or came to the front of the stage, the view was great — we were close enough that you could truly see her face, which wasn’t the case from my seats in Lincoln Financial Field last year. However, she didn’t spend the whole concert on platforms or at the front of the stage, so there was a lot of watching the screen.

But still, the concert was fun! I sang along big chunks of the time and — having seen movie as well — I was familiar enough with the show that I could anticipate some cool moments. And it was awesome to see my daughter and my friends’ daughters having a grand old time.

After, we escaped the crowd by ducking into a restaurant and getting a quick dinner (we were also all parched by the end — we really could not leave the floor to go to the bathroom or get food/drinks without risking not being able to get back to our group!). By the time we got to the RER it was not packed at all, and we got back to the hotel room by 12:45 a.m.

Sunday was low key – most of the others were leaving. We had breakfast with one family, then met up with another family at the Musee L’Orangerie, which is another one I don’t remember visiting before. The room-sized Monets were definitely a viewing experience. We did some shopping, got more crepes (we ate a lot of crepes on this vacation), and then after some downtime, my daughter and I wondered out to find dinner.

The weather was just about perfect — springtime in Paris! — and so we got to eat outside many times. It is lovely in Paris just to check the menu, choose a place, and sit at a table watching people go by. After dinner, we went back to the hotel, but then went back out to walk twice because the evening was so beautiful!

It was a lot of travel for a weekend — the flight home in particular, in seats 28J and K, felt long — but I enjoyed hanging out with my daughter and seeing friends. We did some reminiscing because the friend who suggested this weekend trip lived in Paris during the summer of 2005 and I visited her then. Our lives look a little different now! But hey, as Taylor Swift sings in the bridge for Karma, “I’m still here.” And we are!