The last time KMJ and I went on a big trip so much was different in the world, we were looking forward to summer, painting the house, wouldn’t meet Alex for another six months and had never heard the word Glioblastoma. I had no idea exactly how quickly and dramatically our world would change two years from that day in early June when we flew back from a great week or so in Spain and London for my 40th. One of the things we talked about frequently was “when can we take Alex somewhere fun” and will he actually remember and appreciate it. We had talked about starting in Australia or Costa Rica or a dozen other places I don’t remember. Then came the day that everything changed. We focused on recovery, on PT, on navigating stairs and getting to Hawaii again.
When things started to get harder we talked less and less about future travel and showing Alex the world, it was hard for both of us to realize that probably wasn’t something we would do together but I made her a promise that I would do my best to make sure he saw new places and tried new things. So after covid and lockdowns and everything else, away we go.
I added a new page for Brian & Alex Travel up above, check back in for his writing assignment from school, pictures and more as we head across the pond to London and Paris over the next couple weeks.
I’ve discovered this week that Alex’s travel super power is his ability to sleep 10-12 hours at a time regardless of time zone. I’m so jealous. I keep waking up between 3:00-5:00 AM and wide awake no matter how late I go to bed. Anyhow, one benefit of getting up early is time to plan out the day and take a walk to find fresh baked goods first thing so I walked about over to the other side of the 3rd this morning and found some excellent croissants and a coffee to kick start the morning. That mostly eaten one, that’s the almond and it was incredible so I decided not to share.
Alex eventually got out of bed and enjoyed is chocolate baked goods with some French Lemonade – No sure what the thought process there was but he seemed to enjoy it. Then we walked down to find our favorite 4 metro line to ride across town to Montmartre. Surprisingly the area wasn’t all that crowded on a Tuesday morning and there weren’t many people to be found as we climbed all the staircases up to Sacre Couer.
It was a bit cloudy so the view wasn’t amazing but we took that in before taking a lap inside then headed up the street for one of Alex’s most wanted souvenirs and if you’ve been to Montmarte you may be able to guess what that is. In short order we found an aspiring artist to create the portrait he’s wanted ever since he saw the one I got 20 some odd years ago. He then found a rather unique piece of art based on a close up photo of his eyes so yep we got that one also plus the first Crepe and mulled wine of the day before walking back down the hill.
We caught the train over toward Notre Dame to take a look at that area in the daylight, there’s an amazing amount of work being done in the area to restore the building, but it’s supposed to be open in 2024.
Time for lunch so we walked toward home and stopped by the Marche Enfants Rouges in search of a sandwhich but we ended up with both lunch and dinner. First up the Ham shop featuring more cured and cooked ham options than one can comprehend. You choose your ham, choose your cheese and the appear on a buttered baguette like magic. Alex went with a cured French Ham and I got the French equivalent of my favorite Spanish Iberico.
Then we headed across the street to the Butcher of Paris and shared a Croque Madame and Steak Tartare to round out our lunch. One more stop to buy some chocolates on the way home and we kicked back for a couple hours and not surprisingly I fell asleep.
I woke up to Alex binging Friends season one on Netflix and to the sound of rain on the windows. We finally pulled out or rain coats and headed off to see more holiday lights on the Champ de Elysees. It was really wet, then dried up, then wet again but we walked a few miles taking in the lights on the stores including the crazy details of the LV facade covering a building under construction.
We got to the top of the street at the Arc de Triumphe but didn’t really linger, Alex was very focused on wanting to see the Eiffel Tower at night so we navigated through another big rain shower down the street to the river to get some pictures and stopped at the holiday market for another Crepe and mulled wine.
Around this time phone service kind of crapped out so we wandered a bit to find the RER station, caught a train back up to Notre Dame then walked back to Les Marais winding up home around 11:00 and finally got to bed at Midnight. I still woke up at 3:30 AM, time for more coffee to fuel todays adventures.
We were up at a leisurely hour on Monday for our 100 yard commute across the street to St. Pancreas and the Eurostar, but since we were at Kings Cross took a quick detour to platform 9 3/4 on the way.
Alex finally got his passport stamped as we officially entered the EU at the train station and found a place to sit and wait for our train. We followed the herd of people up to the pllatform and settled in, I last rode the Eurostar in 2001 and recall that taking a while to get from London out to the channel tunnel. Apparently things have changed and there’s higher speed track end to end now so soon we were cruising at 150-180 MPH and rolled in to Paris within two hours.
First off, it’s quite a bit colder in Paris, maybe 15 degress closer to freezing that it was in London so we stopped to locate jackets and hats before hitting the Metro. Thanks to stellar directions from our hosts we found our apartment easily then headed off in search of lunch.
After some false starts with not everything being open on this particular Monday, we found a bakery and had the always delicious jamon and butter on baguette which also came with a couple pastries. I found a dinner reservation while we were eating lunch then we walked, got lost and eventually found our way back home to relax a bit before dinner.
Dinner was Steak at Robert et Louise which wasn’t far away and luckily opened up a reservation since they’re otherwise booked until January. All of the steaks are cooked over fire and simply, perfectly prepared.
Alex opted to order the Pate for us to start, apparently all of the charcuterie we’ve tried from Beast and Cleaver has left an impression. The pate was excellent and came with a big jar of pickles, a great pairing.
We both had the ribeye with roasted potato and green beans whcih came with their own side of Dijon. The steaks were an excellent medium rare, cooked with some butter and finished with salt. Just excellent and I do love seeing the look of amazement on Alex’s face when he finds something new and delicious. Expect there will be a lot of that this week.
Needless to say we were stuffed after dinner and decided to take a walk around to see some Christmas lights. Eventually we found ourselves down by the river at the Hotel de Ville where they had tons of decorations, mulled wine and a climbing wall so Alex gave that a go while I looked at some of the Paris 2024 merch already on sale.
Since we were fairly close by, we kept walking over to look at Notre Dame, then found a Metro station to head towards home. We missed our stop- and ended up at Les Halles so the walk was a bit further than planned but Alex tried his first Nutella crepe as a result – he looked like he had discovered gravity. Then back home and we both fell asleep on the couch.
Just like that we awoke Sunday morning to our last full day in London, for me that started off with being wide awake at 3:00 AM, whereas Alex finally rolled out of bed a more civilized hour. Andy was off golfing so we took Liz out to breakfast at the Cafe for another round of breakfast. She was then nice enough to drive us to a different train station where we could catch a direct ride to Kings Cross where we stayed at a cool hotel thanks to Marriott Points and avoided fighting through Monday morning commute traffic with luggage.
Just a few stops away from Kings Cross is St. John’s Wood and a 3 minute walk from there you’ll find a famous crosswalk so we obviously had to check that out. Thanks to a guy filming a documentary of some sort for blocking off traffic to get a pretty cool picture.
From there it was a quick ride to Green Park, someone important must live in this place.
Another walk down to Leicester Square and we spent some time watching the street performers, checking out the Lego store and then walked up to to Soho Square and caught the tube back over to the hotel to chill out for a bit.
A quick nap later we headed back out to Covent Garden to catch our last big activity of the weekend and check out some theater. KMJ was a big fan of musical theater and with so many options in London it only seemed right that we find a show and as luck would have it “Back to the Future” opened here over the summer and is still running.
This was a good choice, such a fun show, familar story of course and all of the iconic songs and lines you would expect from BTTF and a few surprises. One last walk for the weekend post show to find a bite to eat and see some of the trees all lit up then back to bed. Off to Paris in a couple hours!
Saturday morning everyone slept past 5:00 AM so the day was already off to a good start when Alex and I headed off to find coffee and his other new favorite thing the Bacon Sandwich from the coffee shop down the road.
We headed up north to Camden Market in search of a sweatshirt he had seen in walking around the past couple days. It was as expected, complete chaos with holiday shopping but we eventually found what he was looking for then headed out to the east end to Spitafields Market to find some lunch. KMJ and I had spent some time in this area when we were here in 2015 and it’s only gotten more developed in the last 7-8 years.
Stopped for fish and chips then we found a DLR train over to Greenwhich to wander around the park and Naval Museum before we went back down south to meet Andy and Liz for dinner.
On Friday morning Alex did something he’s always been great at and slept for about 14 hours, meanwhile I was up about every 20 minutes from 3:30 onward. Finally gave up on sleep around 5:00, made tea and tried to to figure out the day. Andy has a standing golf match on Fridays and suggested we grab some breakfast so once Alex was up and functional we all walked down to the Wickham Cafe for a morning fry up. Alex was a bit dubious but quickly became a fan of the fried egg and bread combo dunked in beans.
After breakfast we walked down to the train station and made what seemed like a good choice to jump off and transfer at London Bridge on the way to the British Museum. This led to finding not one but two closed underground stations and a long walk across the river in search of our ride to the museum. Finally made it and took a pretty quick lap looking mainly at the Egyptian and Greek collections. Go find the podcast “Stuff the British Stole” to learn more about many of these and other items in the museum.
Next we wandered down to Covenant Garden to find a snack and took in some street magic on the way before finding yet another train over to Tower Hill and spent a couple hours looking through the Tower of London before walking back across the river to the Borough Market to pick up some dinner snacks.\
The four of us demolished the cheese, bread, olive and charcuterie plate Alex put together, Alex and Andy bonded over their shared opinion that Die Hard is indeed a Christmas movie and we eventually went to off to bed ready for a busy Saturday.
We jumped on the train from the airport and headed toward Paddington taking the time on the way for our usual morning routine of working on the Wordle, Daily Mini and Connections puzzles in the NY Times app. Arriving at the station I decided to grab us a cab over to Charing Cross where we would need to catch a train later in the day. That took way longer than it should have and I kept having to wake Alex up but he was enjoying seeing all of the new shops along the way.
At the station we dropped our bags with the left luggage office and headed off in search of some fresh air and food. First stop was at the Borough Market which Alex just loved, new cheese to try or charcuterie or olives or chocolate everywhere. I got a sandwich and he got the most indulgent mac and cheese I’ve ever seen, we both paired that with a juice and felt about 100% better.
We left the market and found some chocolates to sample on the way down to the river where it was quite foggy then walked back up toward the Tate Museum where we stopped for a moment to appreciate a guy in a Santa outfit singing John Denver (Country Roads) by the Millennium Bridge.
We walked back across the river then jumped back on the tube getting off at Trafalgar Square to take a look at the National Gallery and get indoors for a bit. Alex seemed a bit shocked to see the Van Gogh and Monet just hanging right there, and we spent a long time looking at paintings talking about what we liked or didn’t about them. We wandered through galleries for a bit then headed back out doors but may need to swing back in while we’re here.
At this point by my rough calculation Alex had been awake for almost 24 hours and just hit the wall. So we collected our bags and jumped on the train down to meet Liz and Andy. I got caught up with them while Alex slept for a couple hours. Finally we both got to bed by by around 8:30 and crashed out ready for more exploration on Friday.
After our relatively uneventful 24 hour delay we headed back to the airport on Wednesday morning and before long had tickets in hand and were posted up in the south terminal waiting for our flight which finally boarded uneventfully and quickly being that the plane was maybe 1/3 full at most. There were 4-5 people up in first class, I think 8-9 others in business with Alex and I and I counted about 50 give or take toward the rear of the plane.
Quick detor here to give a shout out to http://www.point.me which is a great tool for quickly finding award space using whatever airline or cc points you may have. For this trip the tool did the work and just told me where book or transfer cc points and an hour later I had round trip business class for both of us.
Anyway back to the flight it was of course nice to have room to stretch out and I took full advantage to crash out for about five hours on the way to London. Alex, did not but managed to fall asleep right about the time we landed at 6:15 AM.
We took the long walk and train ride over to immigration which much to Alex’s dissapointment was all automated and he didn’t get the stamp in his passport that he wanted. Since it was still so early we went to the arrivals lounge for a hot cocoa and a shower, that took quite a while but we emerged feeling much better and ready to face the day.
All packed, out the door, dropped Charlie off for boarding, jumped back in the car, check email to find out that our flight has been delayed a full 24 hours due to “crewing issues”. So talked Alex off the ledge and we we took a walk around Greenlake then both took naps and did nothing all afternoon. It’s really strange to have a day at home with nothing to be done. Back to the airport tomrorow morning and hopefully somewhere over the North Atlantic this time tomorow.
We’re going to London first and couldn’t get the evening flight. What are the odds that Alex stays up for 10 hours watching movies just in time to land in London at 7:00 AM? Check back here to find out.
