France

I love France. I've decided that.

I just spent about 9 days in France and it was absolutely fabulous. We had a group of 18 people:

Me, Alyssa, Emily, Jenna, Sara, Kelsey, Eliza, Lisa, Debbie, Marcus, Eric, Jake, Connie, Mrs. Baker, Mrs. Dominick, Mrs. Kondrot,Madame McCoy, and Jean-Christophe...our tour guide.

We started off in Paris where we visited the Louvre, which is huge. Yes we did see the Mona Lisa and it was just as impressive as anyone else who has been there would say. We were a bit very much jet-lagged having not slept for quite some time at this point though. WE saw the Arc de Triumph, and many other parts of Paris the first night. The second night we went to the second level of the Eiffel Tower, we couldn't go to the top because it was closed but the view was spectacular.

Now I'm going to get the rest of this mixed up because I don't remember the exact order we did everything so I'm just going to list all the things that I loved. I LOVED the Loire Valley. That is the area that has all the Castles, Château de Chenonceau was my favorite (I'll show pictures later). We went to a wine tasting that was fun, this trip was the first time I'd ever had any drop of alcohol, so it was cool trying all the wines, I liked them all haha. After the wine tasting we went into this restaurant that was a cave and so that was fun. It is apparently a thing only rich people can do, live in a cave. Then we had a dance party in the cave.

We went to Nice at the end of the trip, Nice is gorgeous. Though, to get a good view you have to climb very high, I was very proud of myself for keeping up with everyone though, I made it to the top of everywhere we went.

We visited one of France's famous Parfumeries...Perfume Factory...We had a tour guide show us around the factory and then we sampled many different fragrances. I bought one for myself. I smell pretty now haha. I also bought some soaps that smelled very nice.

Now the trip was not flawless, I should mention the two downsides of the trip. One would be...pickpockets. There are a few in France, as there are everywhere and they tend to target touristy looking people. Debbie was pickpocketed...her passport and money were taken from her backpack. This was devastating. Madame, Mrs. Kondrot, and Debbie visited the U.S. Embassy to get her a new passport. That story ended happily.

The worst part of the trip was the way home, no one wants to go home. Our plane was supposed to go from Nice to Frankfurt, stop for a 4 hour layover then Frankfurt to Newark, stop for a 3 hour layover, then Newark to Pittsburgh.

We went Nice to Frankfurt, 7 hour layover because the workers went on strike, then we got to Newark and we had missed our flight to Pittsburgh, it was the only one until the next morning. We were all tired and wanted to be home, there were some tears shed and hugs exchanged as we called home with the sour news. We went to a local hotel for the night, we woke at 4 in the morning for a flight at 6:30, when we got through security and to our gate we were told that our plane was having maintenance problems and that we would not be able to leave until it was fixed. That was more than frustrating. After an hour or so we went upstairs to the USAir counter and talked to someone who was going to get us onto a flight with another company, they booked us and we went over to turn in our luggage and they told us we weren't on the flight, the adults tried to figure this out and we sulked...while trying to remain happy.

In the end they said OK, we are on the flight, they took the first persons ticket, took one look at it and said this was distributed by Lufthansa (the German company). They wouldn't take it, we were feeling thoroughly hopeless at this point. We went back to the USAir counter and they sent us to the plane that was still being fixed. Eventually we got on this plane and the 16 of us went home. We arrived there around 2 or 3, and all of us exhausted we went home.

At least that happened at the end of the trip and not the beginning.

Anyways, I loved the trip it was wonderful and photos will be posted soon.


~Love Because You Are Loved~