TRAVELS WITH VANESSA

A quick train ride away, Aix is entirely different from its port city neighbor. While Marseille is urban, gritty, and for the most part...

After the canceled kayak trip, I was excited to finally get on the water! The sailing trip I'd booked started from l’Estaque, an area on...

I hadn’t consciously put it together until Herve mentioned over lunch that his daughter loved Croatia. Unlike in Paris, she told him, in...

My Kayak trip to the blue coast got canceled at the last minute, so this morning instead I went with Martine to her regular swimming...

The French word for heat wave is « canicule ». I’m not sure if the shocking heat here is technically considered a canicule since it’s...

Such a pure delight to ride this TGV (Train de Grande Vitesse - high speed train) across France! The WiFi is working, the air...

The year I lived in Rouen, 1983-84, I attended the Lycee Privee Rey pour les filles, a private high school in downtown Rouen near the...

We spent the first part of Sunday on Claudia's couch, watching the entire Paris Olympics opening ceremony (absolutely worth watching -...

"I'm coming to Paris," I wrote to my friend Claudia last month. "Can you come and meet me?" Claudia lives 40 minutes outside Cologne,...

I went back up to Sacre Coeur (where I was alarmed to find the Eiffel Tower under wraps -- no doubt thanks to the impending Olympic...

I spent my first afternoon here trying, unsuccessfully, to get to the Musée Montmartre. After making it as far as the steps of Sacre...

I started the day with a visit to Chez Mardini, in the 4th Arrondissement (St. Gervais), where I got to chat with M. Mardini about his...

I remember, when I first came to Rouen, being amazed at how people blithely walked past what to me were stupendously beautiful marvels of...

When I lived in Mt. St. Aignan, approximately a thousand years ago, I attended a private girls' high school in Rouen next to the train...

Vero and Philippe took me on an incredible tour of the peninsula today - a hike through a tiny village with a picnic on the rocks near...

Jet lag is a crazy thing. I woke up last night at 2:30am after four hours, having forgotten to take a melatonin at bedtime; decided to...

Arriving in Paris after an 11-hour red eye is alternately exhilarating and overwhelming - I am by turns overjoyed and miserable, in equal...