Paris in Springtime

Springtime in Paris. The phrase is famous, and back in October 2010 I decided to make the plunge and actually book a vacation to Europe during the Spring when the weather is perfect, rather than during the Christmas holidays when work is slow but the weather is gloomy. I figured that if I could not take off a week or so with better than half a year's notice, something was wrong, both with Microsoft and with myself. So, with that, prior to Halloween I booked a roundtrip from Seattle to Paris on Iceland Air. Over the next few months I planned many different variations of the trip, from spending the entire time in Paris to visiting Amsterdam, or Hamburg, or Poland, or Spain, or Greece, or any other number of European stops. Finally, I decided upon a Paris in Springtime trip that actually had little to do with France, but was a balance between places I had, and had not, been before:

• One night in Paris at the Inter Hotel City (actually just outside Paris, in a town called Beauvais)
• Five nights in Milan at the Hub Hotel, a city I have never before seen
• Three nights in Erding at the Best Western Airport Hotel near Munich, a city I have seen before and actually did not want to revisit, save for the incredible Therme Erding spa
• One final night in Paris proper at the Millennium Hotel, near the CDG airport.

The trip started off rather uneventfully, leaving work at noon for the Seattle airport. The only cause for concern was that I was flying Iceland Air, through Keflavik, and just the week before another volcano had started erupting. This eruption, fortunately, was not as disruptive as the one from the prior year, so it did not impact my flight. I left Seattle more or less on time, there was actually more room in economy than on some of my previous flights, and I arrived in CDG a few minutes ahead of schedule. So far, smooth sailing.

BTW, I'll point out that while I was in Europe in addition to the volcano eruption, the great German E. Coli scare also erupted (starting in Hamburg, first blamed on Spanish cucumbers, then on German bean sprouts, then retracted a second time and assigned to ???). In any case, I am glad I ultimately opted not to travel to Hamburg during this trip, and also that true to my carnivore roots I avoided all green vegetables, save for some cooked green beans on my very last night in Paris.

In any case, having arrived in Paris, my next my goal was to travel from CDG to the town of Beauvais for the evening, in preparation for an 8:30 AM flight to Milan the next morning. According to the Internet, an easy thing to do; reality would be different.