What I Use: Paris 2021 (Premium)

Having completed an epic and long-overdue trip to Paris last week, I can report on some victories and some defeats. There’s a lot to discuss here, and my only worry is that I’ll forget something. So let’s get started.

Paris

My wife and I love Paris. Granted, I wrote a bit about our relationship with the city in last week’s Premium newsletter, so I’ll just note here that Paris is my favorite place on earth and that I’d be living there right now if it made any sense at all. It doesn’t, for a variety of reasons—cost, of course, but also logistics related to friends and family in the United States, especially our kids—but I feel the pull every time I’m there. What I’ve resigned myself to is that we will continue to visit, and that maybe, as part of that More Mobile future I keep writing about, some future visits will be lengthy.

That said, we’ve been to Paris enough that we know people there, we know our way around the city, we have favorite restaurants and haunts. This trip was a bit trickier, however, in that it was short—just five nights—and we hadn’t been there in three years, in large part thanks to COVID. And so we treated this trip like a greatest hits tour in which we hit all the high points: not just our favorite places, but also all the major sites, many of which we’d normally skip on such a short trip: the nice thing about visiting Paris a lot, for example, is that you don’t actually have to go up into the Eiffel Tower every time. This time we wanted to.

When I wrote about testing a microphone and working during this trip, which was a delayed 30th-anniversary gift to ourselves, several readers advised me to spend time with my wife instead, as if I’d be working in the hotel all day and not letting her see the city. This was both amusing and distressing. I feel like I’ve explained my schedule on various trips over the years, and my wife and I couldn’t be more simpatico when it comes to this kind of thing. That is, in a place like Paris, we walk a lot, see what we want to see, and eat and drink. And we’re both writers who want/need to write every day. And so we do that too. Together.

But this Paris trip was still impressive for an unexpected reason. Most times, we’ll visit a walking city like Paris or Washington D.C. and overdo it on the first day or two and then rein it in to appease or aching feet. But this time, that didn’t happen: We spent over 8 hours out in Paris on most days, resting only at cafes and the like. And we only ended up writing/working for about an hour each day. (The exception being Wednesday, when I recorded Windows Weekly from our hotel room over two hours.) We were tired, sure, but also invigorated to be back in Paris, and we wanted to make sure we did it all. And, amazingly, we did.

France vs. COVID

One of the oddities of traveling in these lingering pandemic times is that you need to deal with whatever COVID protocols are in place at your destination and then, when you return to the United States, you need to obtain a negative COVID test. On our two early international trips, to Mexico, earlier this year, this meant that we had to wear masks indoors and out, except when eating or drinking. We were able to get an inexpensive COVID test on both trips through a Hilton hotel, as we’re members.

France was a bit more complicated, but ultimately also easier once we were there. As part of the EU, France was part of a weird international drama that played out this summer in which the EU allowed vaccinated Americans to come to Europe, but the U.S. never returned the favor. By mid-year, there were rumblings that the EU would respond in kind, meaning that our anniversary trip might get delayed yet again.

What happened, instead, was classic Europe: the EU did recommend that member states restrict entry by U.S. citizens, but to my knowledge no country complied. We watched the news nervously for weeks and then months, but as the date grew closer, it seemed like we’d be OK.

Well, except for one thing. The EU, unlike the U.S., does mandate certain COVID-based policies, and so does each country. In France, the rule is that you don’t need to wear a mask outside, which is sensible, but you need to be vaccinated or have obtained a negative COVID test within the past 48 hours to enter restaurants, businesses, and other establishments. This is also reasonable, especially since the EU backs up the vaccinated with a digital COVID certificate, complete with QR-code, that will be scanned to ensure you are vaccinated. And because COVID tests are free and readily available with a 10 to 15 minute turnaround.

We’re not from the EU, of course. But France and other EU countries allow you to apply for this certificate online, and we did so the week before the trip, using scans of our US-based vaccination cards as proof of our compliance with decency and commonsense. Knowing France and its bureaucracy, we were worried that our digital COVID certificate wouldn’t arrive in time. But we had also heard that our US COVID vaccination card would get us into the country and, in turn, into restaurants, museums, and the like.

We needn’t have worried: both certificates arrived days before the trip. We printed them out and saved them to OneDrive, so we could access them from our phones, and we used the digital version all over Paris, successfully, for the duration. It was like into a special club that, in this case, gave you access to everything Paris has to offer.

As with our previous trips, we had to obtain negative COVID tests before we could reenter the United States on the trip home, though this time we could do so up to three days before the flight, instead of two. Here again, France has Mexico beat: there are free COVID testing tents all over the streets of Paris, in front of pharmacies, and so we got tested on the Champs d’Elysee just below the Arc de Triumphe, waited a bit over 10 minutes, and got our results on paper and via email. This success was also added to the information contained in our EU digital COVID certificate. Why the United States can’t do such a thing is unclear.

Flights

I pay for the premium version of Scott’s Cheap Flights and get daily emails about flight deals, mostly international, that relate to places I want to visit and are available at my area airports (New York and Philadelphia). And two of our three international trips this year were booked when I saw an email-based sale or deal via this service. For the Paris trip, this involved an airline called French Bee that we’d never heard of, so it was an unknown. But having had some good success in the past with low-cost European airlines like WOW Air, we decided to go for it: the price was right.

There were a few issues.

First, French Bee flies between Newark Liberty and Paris Orly, not the more typical Charles de Gaulle airport that is closer to the city. This ended up being OK: It took 30 minutes by cab to get to the hotel, and 45 minutes on the return, but that’s fine.

Second, as a second-tier airline, French Bee only flies between certain locations on certain days. In our case, that meant that we could fly overnight on a Saturday (arriving Sunday morning), which is odd, and had to fly home on a Thursday. This would have given us just four nights (and roughly five days) in Paris, which is on the short side, but we figured it was worth it. Oddly, French Bee later change our return flight … to that Friday, giving us an extra day and night in Paris (!). I’d never seen an airline do that before, but we were happy with the change and booked an extra night at the hotel.

(Oddly, the return flight was late in the day on Friday, giving us another half day. This was good and bad, however, as we left Orly at 6:45 pm local time and arrived in Newark late, around 9:00 pm. So the return flight was a night flight too, something we’d also never experienced before. It made for a late arrival at home.

Third, the deal was for coach-class seats, but French Bee offered some upgraded extra-space seats, so we paid a bit more for those in both directions. On paper, these seats looked great. But boarding the plane for Paris, I was disappointed to see that they were bulkhead seats—the seat map didn’t show anything below our row, 11—and that each seat had hard-sided and immovable walls instead of normal seat arms. The seat was exactly as wide as my hips, which made sleep next to impossible. The trip there was really uncomfortable despite all the legroom.

But we also noticed that the premium (business) class area in front of us was mostly empty. So I decided to see if I could upgrade for the trip home. This wasn’t possible online, as it turns out, as I could still only see row 11 and back. So when we arrived at Orly, I asked if I could upgrade the seats and was told yes. I had a figure in my mind and the upgrade price—$200 per seat—coincidentally matched that price. Done.

What a wonderful change. For the return flight, we had much bigger and more comfortable seats, real meals, and wine, and I could comfortably work (on this article and my Surface Pro 8 review). It was money well spent, and Stephanie told me I could consider it a birthday present. It was one of my better birthday presents, too.

Hotel

I don’t usually write about our hotel experiences, but this one was notable for an unusual and goofy reason: thanks to the never-ending COVID nonsense, Hilton, like other hotel chains, has extended its yearly qualifying timeframes for its various membership tiers. And that means that for the first and only time in our lives, we have this year qualified for Hilton Diamond status, which gives us … I don’t know, more points or something. But my wife and I were semi-obsessed about reaching this pointless milestone, and so we decided to book a hotel for our four (and then five) nights in Paris. And thanks to this trip, we were elevated to Diamond status. And we will then never do it again, ever.

The hotel we chose was pretty sweet, too, and our room was on the top floor with a terrace and a view of Sacre Coeur.

We only spent one evening out there drinking wine, as it got dark and cold early, but we also wrote on our laptops out there one day a bit, and we took pictures of the view every day, morning and night. Hilton Diamond wasn’t going to obtain itself.

I know. Stupid.

Bags and luggage

If you’ve read any of my What I Use articles related to specific trips, nothing much has changed over the years. I still travel with the same two Rick Steves bags—a Velocé Shoulder Bag, which I use as a laptop bag, and a Ravenna Rolling Case for luggage—because they meet my needs and have served me well over the years. My wife transitioned to a 21-inch Travelpro Maxlite with spinner wheels a years ago and prefers that over more traditional two-wheeled rolling luggage like my Ravena, but I don’t like how they can drift off when you’re just standing there. And I can’t stuff as much clothing and other items in there for whatever reason. But we own three of the Travelpros now, and my kids use the other two.

On longer trips, I always bring two or even three laptops, but I made a conscious effort to be less compulsive on this shorter trip. That made the Rick Steves Velocé Shoulder Bag more manageable, as it only needed to hold the Surface Pro 8 I’m currently reviewing, my iPad Air, some power cables, a Pixel 4a 5G that I brought along as a backup (and never used), my Bose QuietComfort Earbuds, and my older wired Bose QuietComfort 20 noise-canceling headphones (not made anymore; I brought them because the Pixel 5a I’m using on this trip has a headphone jack and I was worried about losing an earbud in the dark of the plane when I fell asleep). The bag also contained our passports, my sunglasses, and a few other items.

And as with previous trips, I always bring along a gadget bag that’s packed in my luggage alongside my toiletry kit on top of my clothes. As always, this bag contains my power adapter/extension cable, various charging cables, and the like.

Phone = camera + connectivity

On our previous international trips this year, both to Mexico, I struggled with what phone to bring: I liked the Pixel 4a 5G I was using until the nearly identical Pixel 5a arrived in September, but it doesn’t have optical zoom and I felt that would come in handy. Added to that, I switched from Google Fi to Mint Mobile in early 2020, right as the pandemic started, mostly to save money. And sure enough, Mint Mobile is much cheaper than Google Fi or most wireless carriers. But it has no international plans to speak of, aside from some basic phone/text capabilities for Canada and Mexico. If I wanted data, and I will always want data, I’d need something else too.

Before the June trip to Mexico City, I re-upped on Google Fi, figuring I would use it for international travel only and just pause the account when I was home. You can do that for three months at a time, and never pay a cent, and that has worked out well. I used the Google Fi SIM with my Huawei P30 Pro, which by that point was about two years old, but still had a great camera system with optical zoom, and it mostly worked out OK. (I really don’t like Huawei’s version of Android, however, and third-party skins are kind of kludgy.) I kept my Mint SIM in the Pixel, and mostly didn’t bring it around with us, checking it for calls or texts when we got back to the Airbnb.

For our second, two-week trip Mexico in August, when we visited San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, and Mexico City, I made a deal with my wife to use her Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra, which is newer than the Huawei and has a better camera system and with an even better optical zoom capability. Again, I kept the Fi SIM in the Pixel and mostly left that at whatever Airbnb when we were out in the world. And again, that worked OK, though it was awkward sharing the one phone.

This trip represented a strange problem: we have visited Paris and France approximately 25 times in our lives and have spent about a year of our lives here. We’ve taken probably thousands of photos of just Paris, over a period of 28 years, and we know the city very well. The issue is that we’ve not been there a lot recently. Our last Paris home swap was in July 2016, and our last trip there, with our daughter Kelly, was in October 2018, three years ago. So this trip would be sort of a greatest hits tour, where we simply wanted to revisit all the classics and our favorites again. Catch up, if you will.

In the two months since our last Mexico trip, the Pixel 5a has replaced the Pixel 4a 5G, but the camera systems are identical, and the photos one takes with either are likewise of identical quality. Which is to say, pretty damn great. It’s especially good for night and low-light shots, where it still outpaces the best that Apple and Samsung offer. But it still lacks optical zoom. What to do?

Ultimately, my experiences with those other smartphones influenced me to simply use the Pixel 5a and just deal with it. And since my wife’s Samsung does have great optical zoom capabilities, I could always fall back on that. And as it turns out, I never did: the Pixel 5a delivered consistently great photos for the most part. Sure, the zoom shots are lacking, but they’re serviceable. And I was happy I just stuck with the camera I rely on normally at home. (And even happier that I’m replacing it with a Pixel 6 Pro that does have at least some form of optical zoom.)

But using just the Pixel introduced a new problem: what to do about my two wireless carrier services? This ended up working out much better than I had anticipated: the Pixel 5a supports dual SIMs (yes, the 4a 5G did too), one of which is an internal eSIM, with the other being a normal nano SIM. I had never used this configuration because, when I researched it, I misunderstood Google’s documentation. I thought it supported two SIMs but that you could only use one at a time. But this would be fine for Paris, I figured, since I would use Google Fi most of the time, and could sometimes switch to Mint to see if there were any phone calls or texts.

But that’s not how it works. Instead, you can have both SIMs active all the time for both calls and texts. It’s only data that must be one or the other. And, yes, you can of course switch that on the fly. But I would never need to do that: I would just use Google Fi for data in Paris, and then switch back to Mint when we got home. (When I would pause Fi again until January’s trip.)

To make this work, I just left my Mint Mobile SIM in the Pixel and connected to Fi in Android settings using the eSIM. I made a few choices, leaving data on Mint until we landed in Paris, and that was that. This worked perfectly. And while I know those of you have had already used dual SIMs are judgingly shaking your heads right now, whatever. I was really happy with this setup. And will write up about it in more detail as part of my More Mobile series soon.

Fun with power and charging

Pre-COVID, we made a point of spending at least one month each year outside of the United States, and with this trip, we’ve surprisingly managed to do just that in 2020. But the first three of those four weeks were spent in Mexico, which is almost “international travel lite” in the sense that it’s only one time zone off from the east coast of the United States, you can travel there in a normal day flight, and there are no worries about power conversion since they’re on the same power plug system as in the U.S.

By comparison, traveling to France is more complex and demanding. It’s six hours ahead of the east coast of the U.S., it requires an overnight flight, and, like the rest of Europe and most of the world, it’s on a completely different electrical system that requires electrical adapters for all your electronics.

This is all obvious on the face of things, and since we’ve traveled to Europe so frequently over the years, it’s safe to assume that I know the drill. So it is with some amazement and disappointment that I have to report that I somehow managed to leave for the airport without having packed a single electrical adapter, despite the fact that I have very well organized bags of European electrical adapters—along with bags of converters for other locales—at home.

This need is so obvious, my wife purposefully didn’t even ask ahead of time, though she says she thought of it: and realized it was a dumb question: I’m usually so organized that this would never be an issue, and I usually hand out a few converters to everyone I travel with in my family before we leave. Which, I reminded her, should have tipped her off that I had forgotten, but no matter. When she asked about it on the way to the airport, I told her we’d just get a few in the terminal before we boarded our flight.

Which, of course, we didn’t. Our flight was just one of two flights being served by the security area we went through, and I was so excited that there wasn’t a line at security that we went through immediately. No worries, I figured: there will be a store in there that sells converters and other electronics. And there was, but it had only a single electrical adapter in stock. For the UK. Sigh.

OK, we’ll be fine, I said. When we arrived at Orly airport in Paris, we’ll just buy some there. But when we did arrive in France, I had not slept at all, basically—I had slept a little, but fitfully and uncomfortably in that “extra comfort” seat that was really a trap from the Saw movies—and we were both a little bleary-eyed. We stumbled through customs—again, amazingly, no line—quickly walked out into the terminal and then outside, got in a cab, and headed to the hotel.

Goddammit, I suddenly blurted out. We had somehow managed to forget the converters again. This time, the plan was to ask if the hotel had any left in lost and found by previous customers and, if not, I figured we could visit a FNAC, which is a sort of French Best Buy (but better). And when we did arrive at the hotel, we got our first good news: the room had one universal adapter, built into the desk, that would accommodate a U.S. power adapter. And since I always travel with an excellent four-port power adapter and extension cord (which also has four USB ports), I figured that might do the trick.

We had to wait an hour or two to get into the room, since we had arrived so early. So we walked out into Paris, discovered a Monoprix right around the corner, and they had a universal power adapter. It was bigger than the units I had at home, but I was happy to have it. And if the room-based universal adapter was enough, we could leave it unopened and return it. So all was well.

In the end, we did keep the purchased adapter, since it was more convenient to have two places where we could charge things in the room. And my wife was able to charge her phone and headphones, and whatever else, off of the USB ports on her laptop. So the two converters worked OK. I’d have brought more normally, of course. But it was fine.

Well, except for one curious problem. And this was one I don’t think I would have foreseen. Obviously, we both brought some variety of USB devices with us. We both brought a smartphone (OK, I brought an extra just in case) and a pair of wireless earbuds, and I also brought an iPad Air. My wife has a Kindle. And I brought some wired noise-canceling headphones (described elsewhere). And some other things.

Here’s the thing. Almost all of these devices are USB-C-based. And, in literally each case, the charging cable we had was a USB-C to USB-C cable: Between the two of us, we didn’t bring a single USB-C to USB-A cable. Not by design. Just by circumstance. There were ten USB-A ports in the hotel room—two on each nightstand, two on the desk, and the four from my power adapter/extension cord. And boy would charging things have been easier and more convenient if he had just had a few USB-C to USB-A cables. Or even a few dongles. But we didn’t.

Again, not a big deal. Just an unexpected problem. But now that it’s happened, it’s something I’ll try to prepare for. Or maybe what I need is a power adapter/extension cord with USB-C ports. We have clearly shifted into the USB-C era.

Fun with microphones and podcasting

If you followed my adventures in Mexico this past summer, you know that I spent $100 on a decent USB-based podcasting microphone, which ended up not working at all with the laptops I had brought on that trip. (Both were HPs, which may or may not be of note.) The microphone had worked perfectly when I tested it with a desktop PC before the trip, but I obviously should have tested it with the PCs I’d be using. So that’s on me, whatever the cause of the incompatibility.

I ended up returning that microphone (twice, actually, as I bought a second one to find out if the problem was the microphone itself), so when it came time for this Paris trip, I figured it was time for a new microphone. Normally, I wouldn’t bother for a trip of this length: I would only need to record Windows Weekly once, and if the audio quality wasn’t perfect, no worries, that’s part of the charm, right? And for First Ring Daily, I like to do the show via my phone and my Google USB-C Earbuds, which works fine and is a bit fun because I’m out in the world somewhere.

But I had an ulterior motive: I wanted to see whether a good USB-based microphone would work well on the road because of my whole More Mobile thing, where I expect to be, well, more mobile in the future and perhaps move around more often. So I purchased a slightly more expensive version of the microphone I had brought to Mexico, tested it against multiple laptops, and discovered something interesting: it worked fine. Unless I used it with HP laptops. But that’s no problem, for now, at least: I was only planning on bringing one (sort of) laptop on this trip, the new Microsoft Surface Pro 8 that I’m currently using. And when I tested it at home, it worked fine.

And good news: when I used it for Windows Weekly this week in Paris, it worked fine too. You can see—well, hear—the results for yourself in episode 748. This microphone is clearly too big and bulky for a week-long trip, but it will be good to have on longer trips, and we’ve already booked an 18-day trip to Mexico City for the second half of January. So I will probably keep it.

Oh, one more thing about the microphone: as noted, there was no line when we went through security in Newark, but we did have one little hitch. As is so often the case, I watched as one of my bags, in this case the luggage, moved through the x-ray scanner at security. It went forward. Stopped. Went back. Stayed there. Someone else came over. And the bag was shuttled off to the side where someone would hand examine it.

I correctly figured that the problem was my gadget bag. But it hadn’t occurred to me that a pipe bomb-shaped metal microphone would trigger additional scrutiny at security. Which, in retrospect, was dumb. So when we flew home, I put it in my laptop bag and took it out and it put it in a tray alongside the Surface Pro 8 and iPad Air when we went through security at Orly. You live, you learn.

We did a lot of both on this trip.