OK, so after a quick visit to Paris this is the real start of our French trip, the first of 22 stops that are new to us. As Mark mentioned we’re going to be moving fast, so this was a two-day stop. The quick summary is that Lille (pronounced “leel”) is a lovely, lively town worthy of a two-night stop, but not more than that to be honest.

First was a fast and fabulous hour-long train ride north from Paris. The TGV, France’s high-speed rail, really moves. I don’t know what the average speed was, but it takes two-and-a-half hours to drive between Lille & Paris but little over an hour on the train. Heck, I barely had time to take a nap and *snap* we were pulling into Lille.

On arrival you notice a couple things quickly. First, you’ve gone a long way north; suddenly it feels almost Nordic. Now, Paris itself is surprisingly far north, north of Duluth, Minnesota, and that’s up there. But Lille is another 120 miles north of that, further north than anything in the U.S. except of course Alaska. So here we are, arriving on the 4th of July, and the temperature is in the 50s in the morning and almost never reaching 70 degrees. After late June in New York this is pretty nice!

Second you quickly notice that the train station is only minutes from the center of the Old City. A lot of Lille was badly damaged during World War II but the center was largely spared leaving this cute, historic district with some beautiful buildings. It’s worth nothing, of course, that it’s a pretty small district; after an hour or two of wandering around you’ve pretty much seen it all.

What else is there to see in Lille? There are two major sites, the cathedral and an art museum, and they were both kind of busts. Mark went to the cathedral (I was doing laundry) and quickly texted me not to waste my time when I was free. It was built to replace Lille’s major church, destroyed during the French Revolution, but took some 150 years – from 1854 to 1999 – to complete. And while much of the church is classic Gothic, the façade is a truly ugly modern structure. He hated it and since I’d already walked past it and seen that weird front I didn’t go to see it.

And then the art museum, the Palais des Beaux Arts, has the second largest collection in France, behind only the Louvre. Apparently the gap between numbers one and two is pretty large; there just wasn’t much there to impress. A kind of second-rate El Greco, a few Reubens and that was about it. They had an exhibit linking Monet to Joan Mitchell, one of the giants of abstract expressionism. So they had three of her late-in-life works and six of his. Interesting but … modest.

With that said, there were still some highlights. As I said the Old City – especially the central square, the Grand Place – was nice. The food was nothing short of great; every meal was a treat. There is a wonderful park maybe half a mile west of the city center, perfect for walking, running, and reading … and I did all three there. A really nice gym that sold day passes for just €10. And then one thing we love about traveling in France: laundromats everywhere!

That’s it, then. A quick, rewarding stop in Lille. Next up, Amiens.

For our summer vacation this year, we decided we wanted to travel extensively in France. The idea was to get to the corners of the country that we’ve missed in our past travels. We’ll spend all of July and August — 9 weeks — getting to know this amazing country better than ever.

That means we’re doing a couple things differently from how we typically like to travel. To begin with, we are squeezing 25 stops into this trip, meaning an average stay in each location of just 2-1/2 nights. We usually make very few stops under three nights, preferably longer, but we’re being a bit more ambitious here so we can cover more territory. Our theory is that France has hundreds of small towns or medium-sized cities that would be perfect places to spend a couple days. We want to get to know a good sample.

We will also be traveling by car more than usual — about six of the nine weeks. The rest will be by train, which we generally prefer. But of course a car really helps us get to some of the more remote places we want to cover on this trip. Our itinerary is designed so that we rarely spend more than 2 or 3 hours in transportation from place to place.

We left steamy New York on June 30 and landed in Paris July 1 for a brief three-night stay to get started. Paris is one of only three stops on this trip that we’ve both already been to. The others are Bordeaux and Lyon, both wonderful places where stops help to break up the travel into bite size pieces.

If you are flying into Paris you can hardly not stay a little! Three nights here is of course way too little, but it’s better than nothing. We spent those three days marveling at just how beautiful this city is. The weather was glorious. It was even on the cool side for July, making for perfect walking.

As a special bonus, my dear friend of more than 40 years, Shideh, happened to be visiting here from Sweden for a short weekend visit with a couple of her cousins from Los Angeles. So the highlight of Day One was a visit to the Pompidou Center with Shideh and her cousin Faraz to see a Brancusi exhibit, followed by a cafe stop and a lovely dinner. Great way to kick off the trip.

I’d be remiss not to point out a couple other notable happenings in Paris at this time. First is the incredible rebirth of Notre Dame following the devastating fire of 2019. Its brand new central spire was just revealed a few months ago. The cathedral will reopen in December, an unbelievable feat in light of the amount of destruction and the challenge of putting together the plans and the thousands of workers, craftsmen, and experts need to restore it to its medieval glory. We were incredibly moved by the displays around the worksite of the restoration process and the workers making it happen.

And of course Paris is getting ready to host the 2024 summer Olympics in just a few short weeks. It was fun to see the preparations everywhere. Many of the venues are right smack in the center of the city, including the river Seine, which will host the first ever opening ceremony to take place outside of a stadium. As with the rebuilding of Notre Dame, the French can do incredibly ambitious and creative things when they want to. We’re going to be out of here before the Olympic crowds arrive, but it’ll be fun to be in France while it’s all happening.

In the art world, we enjoyed a fantastic exhibit at the Pompidou Center of the work of the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, the first truly modern sculptor. It may be our last visit to the Pompidou before it closes in 2025 for a five-year massive renovation. And Jim went to an exhibit he was crazy about at the Orsay Museum, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first large Impressionist art exhibit. It featured works from the 1874 Impressionist exhibit, a radical opposition to the official French Salon, as well as the official Salon of the same year. It was like seeing history change right before your eyes.

We are right now sitting on one of France’s incredibly fast TGV trains, flying north to Lille, right on the border with Belgium, for the next stop of this summer adventure in France.

I went back and looked and we wrote 11 blog posts from Paris during the nearly six years we were nomads, and then I added a 12th in 2019 when I came here with Mark’s dad. I guess that tells you something about how we feel about the City of Light. In fact, as I was walking (and walking and walking) around the city the last few days I realized that to a significant degree Paris really is my Happy Place, the place I feel most comfortable, most complete. I just love the feel of the city, the scale, the climate, and of course the food.

We had four full days after a late afternoon arrival from Saint-Tropez. The train ride was uneventful (that’s good) but we were surprised at how God-awful the food choices were on a four-hour-plus trip. We made the journey on Mark’s birthday, checked into our hotel, explored just a little, then went to a fabulous meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant. To be honest we’re both sort of tired of the Michelin experience: the first few courses are exciting but then they just keep coming and coming and coming. At some point your mind just glazes over whatever fabulousness you’ve just experienced. Now, to be certain, it was a great meal. After that, though, we were really eager to have our future meals at more relaxed Parisian bistros.

The one specific agenda items we had on our itinerary was the Pompidou Center, the city’s modern art museum. In part that’s because it’s a great museum, but the particular attraction was an exhibit of Shirley Jaffe’s work, an American who moved to Paris around 1950 and spent most of the next 65 years there. What was notable about that change is that she started as an abstract expressionist and just as the whole art world was moving from Paris to New York, she moved from New York (where she got her degree from the Cooper Union, just across the street from us!) to Paris. And what made it even more interesting for us is that we actually have one of her pieces on the wall in our dining room. I have to say, it was a great opportunity to see the amazing body of work she left as well as the transition from abstract expressionism (that everyone was doing) to a decidedly idiosyncratic geometric style and to see just where our piece fit into her life.

Otherwise? A lot of it was about food where breakfasts continued to be simply overwhelming, as we were staying at the sister property of the place we stayed at Saint-Tropez. Beyond that every single meal was just this amazing collection of great restaurants. I don’t know if I’d forgotten how amazing the food is here or if I’d somehow started to take it for granted but after something approaching four years since our last visit, we were impressed.

And otherwise our four days were spent walking, walking, and more walking as I tried to experience all the parks I love and the neighborhoods we enjoy. It was sort of a Greatest Hits visit but that took a lot of energy. In fact, over the four full days I averaged over 14 miles a day around the city. And just for the record even that level of activity doesn’t begin to compensate for the croissants and deserts and breads and Negronis. We both have a bit of work to do when we get back to New York to work those pounds off.

Oh, and one final note: France is over COVID. Down in Saint-Tropez we essentially saw no masks. On the train ride up to Paris Mark estimated that maybe one person in 20 was masked and around the city it was measurably less than that. Every now and then you’d see someone in an indoor space wearing a mask but it was pretty rare. The good news is that we both tested negative the day before returning to the states – a negative test is required for flying into the U.S. – so we made it home.

And one even final-er note. We have a fair amount of travel queued up for the rest of the summer. Eight weeks from late June to late August in Slovenia, Croatia, Norway, and Sweden and then two weeks in Bavaria for Oktoberfest and general sight-seeing. So as we settle into four weeks in NYC there’s all that to look forward to!