Twenty years ago, Tanya and I had been together for a short while and it was a good time to go on holiday.
So we went to France.
Gads. We were so much younger then :-/
It was a bit of a whirlwind tour (Tanya will claim they all are) — fly into Paris, find a place to stay (place we supposedly had booked via a friend in France knew nothing). Take the underground (? can’t remember) around the back of Montmarte, check out the Sacré Coeur (270 steps), walk down via Pigalle and the Pompidou. Day 2, Louvre, walk up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, Musée de l’Homme, the queue was too long at the Eiffel, by complete coincidence found the bust of Antoine de Saint-Exupery on Square Santiago du Chili on our way to the Rodin Museum, and by yet another complete coincidence ran into Alison April, a friend from Stellenbosch, at the D’Orsay. What else, o yes, Cluny, then check out the stained glass windows and the gargoyles at the Notre Dame (which was being refurbished, scaffolding all over the place). Supper somewhere in the Latin Quarter.
Did I mention we were younger then?
Day 3, train to Epernay (Moët) and from there to Strasbourg, where we hired a car.
And by complete coincidence (no, really) friends Pim and Thandie were at close to Strasbourg with their Land Rover 101 Forward Control (OK, the coincidence was the time and the place, I had planned the route to meet up with them there).
(Rest of the trip? Drove all the way down to Marseilles sampling wine all over the place, hung out at Domaine des Anges where a friend was the winemaker and my brother was helping in the cellar, and flew out of Marseilles in time to beat the kids back home at the end of the school holiday).