Marcia and I are home from a great trip to London and Paris, with a quick zip via EuroStar train under the English Channel between those two epic destinations. We were fortunate to have unseasonably nice weather in both cities — dry and (relatively) warm — so we spent a lot of time outside walking about, logging a lot of distance. (My FitBit tells me I walked about 160,000 steps and covered about 80 miles on foot in the past week).

We’d been in London last summer, so this time we visited some less obvious tourist sites (e.g. Dickens Museum, National Gallery, British Library, Soane House, Battersea Power Station, Westway Flyover/Portobello Road, Tate Modern, King’s Cross/St. Pancras), having hit the more obligatory highlights in June. On the flip side, this was my first time in Paris, and Marcia hadn’t been there since college, so we did a mix of the expected and unexpected there (e.g. The Louvre, Notre Dame, Catacombes, Eiffel Tower, Montparnasse Cemetery, Bois de Boulogne, Stade Roland Garros, Shakespeare and Company, Bon Marche).

We had an extraordinary seven-course dinner at Le 39V just off the Avenue des Champes-Elysees on New Year’s Eve, and then joined a mass of people stretching from the Arc de Triomphe back towards the Seine as fall as my eyes could see. The countdown to 2019 was made magical by lasers and lights and fireworks turning the Arc into the grandest, largest projection screen imaginable. It was not quite as insane as New Years Eve in Reykjavik two years ago, but it was a close second in my own life experience.

I took a lot of pictures, as I always do, and if you’d like to see the full gallery, you can click on the picture below of me and mine beloved sharing our last meal of 2018, and getting photo-bombed by the Eiffel Tower. Next up on the international travel register for 2019, we’ll be visiting St. Kitts and Nevis for a work trip in February, then celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary in June with a trip to Greece. Watch this space for the photos and reports!

Happy after delightful dinner at Le 39V. Click the pic to see the entire gallery.