Bienvenue!
Musée d’Orsay; 10/24/25
Welcome to my scrapbook of memories of my amazing (if somewhat rainy) trip to Paris in October 2025! My name is Nicole and I took myself to Paris on a Rick Steves' Best of Paris in 7 Days tour. I'm very much a "wander around the city, learn history, eat good food, and go to museums" type person. This was the trip of my dreams in the present, but also a trip through time.
Who am I and why am I here (and was there)...
So, in 2019, I resolved that I would live the life that I wanted to live and travel more and see all the places I had dreamed of seeing. Travel had always been encouraged in my family, actual travel and slide shows of trips others had taken (more on that later) meant that I had always wanted to see the world.
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And then we all know what happened.
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​After years of studying French on Duolingo so that I could at least say that I had made an effort when I eventually got to France (including developing an unconscious shrug when saying “je ne sais pas” and an odd ability to talk about owls and lost shoes - but only ever one lost shoe), and watching the cyclists ride through the streets of Paris during the summer Olympics, and a couple of months overthinking everything, I had booked:​​​
Why this tour (and why book a Rick Steves' tour)?​
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Paris (and I liked the idea of just spending a week in one place)
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I wanted to be part of a group - I was traveling solo and, while I'm used to traveling by myself, I like to be able to have social interactions with tour mates
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As much as I love travel and planning what I would like to do, the logistics of travel (hotels, how to get from point A to point B, etc.) are significantly less exciting
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I loved the planned activities - it's a fairly active tour, but active in the sense of a LOT of wandering the streets of an amazing city
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Finally, I had been reintroduced to Rick Steves when I stumbled across Monday Night Travel when I moved across several states in 2021 when everyone was still social distancing and loved the sense of community (including ending one evening singing along to Molly Malone with a bunch of strangers on Zoom) and had a really good sense that I'd feel comfortable on any of the tours​​
I set a countdown timer on my phone and began preparing for the trip - and 5 years after a green owl taught me to say, "L'année prochaine, je vais à Paris!", it suddenly became "Le mois prochain..."
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And then, "Le semaine prochaine..."
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And then, finally, "Demain, je vais à Paris!"
But first - A brief detour to the past
In the middle of reading guide books, watching videos, finding flights and hotels, and figuring out what else I wanted to do on the trip, I discovered a box of my grandfather's Kodachrome slides. He had been to Europe on business trips, and had been in Paris in 1956 and 1958. So, I added scanning old family photos to the "to do" list before I left and spent hours Googling locations (turns out the box labeled "Paris" also includes Brussels and Chartres...). But it was a lot of fun to try to see what had changed in the nearly seven decades since they were taken (beyond the lack of some really cool cars...) - and what hasn't - and the difference between slides taken on a Leica in the 1950s and those from my cell phone in 2025. I've started a site for my repeat photography (planning on following in his footsteps...). I've stitched and overlaid some of the photos on the following pages - that was fun, but not quite as easy as it looks.