Jared and I have not been able to go on a trip just the two of us for awhile. We've added a couple days to family trips but not too long. So we had some flight credits to use and we were able to get some great nonstop flights to Paris just two weeks out from our travel date!
Its been a busy year with having lots of Menieres issues and then being so busy with wedding planning, graduations, Trek planning and activities, and baby Soleil, and then getting ready for Miles's mission.
The first time we went on a trip without our kids was a cruise when I was pregnant with Miles. I remember realizing how important it was to have some time where it is just the two of us!
I love traveling with Jared cause he just makes me laugh all the time. He is all about the good food, and finding a spa or cool hotel to stay in.
I am the trip planner and usually create the whole itinerary. I always ask him what he wants to do but the truth is he doesn't really care that much. He just wants to see cool new things and have plenty of chill time too.
He was excited this trip because he listened to a class that taught him how to maximize points for travel and how to get all these good travel deals. I was skeptical at first but it ended up being so fun!
So we started in Paris! Booked our hotel on the flight and we ended up really loving it. It was a cute little place that was close enough to the things we cared about for just being there one night. We arrived on a Monday and in Europe so many things are closed on Mondays and we've been to Paris a few times so we went to Angelina's for breakfast and spent the hour wait in line talking to some cute sisters from Ukraine and petting their cute French Bulldogs. Angelinas was so good and sooo rich. We spent the evening at the Eiffel Tower in the pouring rain! Then had a late dinner near the hotel in an outdoor cafe.
The next day was our train to Avignon! We love the high speed trains! Its such an easy way to travel. We have to give ourselves a little more time at the train station because we are newbies but we still found it so convenient to avoid CDG and to be able to leave right from the city and not have to arrive so early. Made the travel days feel like less of a hassle. Getting to Avignon only cost us $30 each. So cheap!
We met such a cute guy on the train. He was very excited that we were from Utah because he mountain biked in Moab a few years ago. He is an optometrist from Marseille and really loved the outdoor sports and showing us all his photos from Utah.
In Avignon we rented a little Mini Cooper convertible. We've had good luck with Sixt car rentals in Europe especially. And we headed to Aix en Provence. In Aix we booked a cheap hotel. It wasn't a good one but the nicer ones were so much more expensive and we tried to stay in an average budget per night and this helped us stay in some nicer places a few days later!
Jared found a great dinner place and eating there takes several hours but was fun. The waitress spoke only French and Portuguese and we thought someday everyone in the family needs to learn at least one other language so we can travel easier! She was cute though and really tried to explain to us what we were eating. We used google translate a lot where you can take a photo of the menu and it translates it. I know a lot of French words from taking French in high school, but I don't undertstand spoken French words very well. And this menu had a lot of weird things on it so I definitely needed some help. But it was so good!
The next day we explored Aix until the afternoon. We loved all the little soap shops and especially so many essential oil places! We love checking out which kinds of diffusers there were and all the accessories. We definitely appreciated doTERRA's quality after trying some of them though! Not the same. We loved seeing all the bags of lavender. doTERRA sources their lavender from the area. We got some gelato which was not good compared to Italy. But the city was just so cute! Loved the Sezane store as well! It was a little rainy so I got a cute umbrella.
That evening we drove to Cannes. There are a lot of cute towns in the Riviera and the reason we picked Cannes was a shorter drive and a great price on a hotel that was right on the beach with an incredible room upgrade. It was way fun! Room was huge and overlooked the Mediterranean. It was a rainy day though and so the beach wasn't really the same as it would have been. We enjoyed walking to dinner on the promenade and the really great food in the hotel. We also loved visiting the cute village of Gourdon! It was fun to drive around and see all the unique places around! A British lady that worked at a clothing boutique in Gourdon was so fun to talk to. She said she knew all about Mormons from Netflix! Oh yay! Can we chat about misinformation? haha. But Elise's comp from her mission Ashlyn was on a BBC documentary so hopefully it was that slightly more accurate one instead of the many showcasing fundamentalists who they don't distinguish from other LDS people.
The next day we headed to Villfranche-sur-Mer and we went to the village of St Paul de Vence along the way. It was way bigger than Gourdon and super interesting! We didn't spend too much time in the villages just enjoyed the drives and the views and then went along to our next stop. The hotel in Villefranche was gorgeous. And we loved seeing all the yachts in the harbor. We really didn't explore too much but we loved the hotel and views and watched some movies in the room. Next morning we went to Eze, beautiful drive! Gorgeous views.
The last two nights we spent in Isle sur la Sorgue which is closer the Avignon and where were could spend two nights in our really nice and inexpensive airbnb and go to the markets! We love farmers markets and this one is a huge market that has lots of antiques and draws people from all over the area. We got a great deal on the airbnb there and it is close to the other villages that I've been dying to see. On the riviera pretty much all the hotel staff spoke English. In Isle sur la Sorgue hardly anyone spoke English.
We went to Gordes and Rousillon on Saturday. I loved the church in Gordes! It was a really beautiful city and so fun to lookout from. Rousillon has some unique ochre deposits and more earth tone colors. We watched the BYU game at the airbnb and had awesome crepes. By this time, we were kinda getting impatient with all the slow two hour dinners. And we just wanted street food. So that was fun actually. And we met a cute young couple that shared the Airbnb across from us who just got engaged. It was really fun to hear their story.
The next morning we walked to our parking spot and found that our car was missing! Ugh. There were no signs saying that you couldn't park there. But apparently everyone knows that the market covers the entire town on Sundays except for us and the other Brazilian travelers. So we had quite an ordeal getting our car back. The police station was closed. We had no idea where the car even was. And we didn't speak any French and the cops there speak no English. Thankfully our new Brazilian friends could speak a little French and a little English too and we were able to get someone to open the police station, tell us where our cars were and get them out of the impound lot before our train back to Paris! We were praying hard because we couldn't leave without returning the car, but we had a train and plane tickets riding on this. We both were ready to go home at this point too. We were so relieved it worked out! And we had enough time to see the Palais des Papes in Avignon. It was another really cool old city and very impressive. The photos of the Palais des Papes is what made me originally want to see the area! Sadly we didn't get to explore the market at all which we were really looking forward too. By the time we got our car back there was no parking anywhere in the town and it wasn't practical. We made our train, and our plane and got to bring home some good food from the airport even! Lots of little food shops and things.
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| watched Soren give a church talk on the high speed train! |
Anyway my mom travels solo a lot and she always says how she meets people everywhere she goes and says how friendly people are and that was one of the fun parts of this trip too! We met so many friendly people. This was a really different kind of vacation for us! Not much prior planning. We didn't stay in one place longer than one night except once. But it still felt like a relaxing trip.
It was great to just have some time for the two of us! I love spending time together. It always reminds me that at the end of the day he's my best friend! Life throws a lot of demands with managing kids, household, finances, jobs, and sometimes we get caught up in the tasks and day to day and its just nice to have a break from that and have it be simple and just enjoying each other!
