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 you...

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