House Of Boy and Girl: Our Trip Itinerary

I'm really excited about our upcoming trip. We've got our itinerary pretty well figured out, and we've reserved all of our hotels and our car for the trip. I put together a little map and a little montage of pictures of the places we'll be going.

Our flight arrives in Frankfurt at 5:00am (yikes!) so we'll be spending the first part of that day driving to our first destination, Reims, France. Reims is in the heart of the Champagne region, and many of the fine champagne houses are located there. We don't plan to see those on the first day, though, we're just stopping in Reims to see the Cathedrale Notre Dame de Reims, which is famous for its size, as well as for its Chagall stained glass windows. We'll probably grab lunch in Reims, then start to mosey our way towards our hotel for the night, viewing famous vineyards from the car, checking out the town of Epernay, and searching for the little Salon stone along the way. Eventually we'll get to our hotel which is located about an hour away in a little town called Etoges. The hotel is located in a 17th century chateau, and it features A MOAT!!! How cool is that? Who knows if it will actually have water in it when we're there, but who cares. It has A MOAT!!! LOL

The next day we go back to Reims to tour the Roman chalk caves at Ruinart. They are a UNESCO world heritage site, and it should be a pretty cool tour. After that, we get to taste a few wines at the Ruinart house. We're not quite sure what we're doing for the rest of the day, but it will involve more champagne tours and general walking around Reims. We spend the night at our moat hotel again that night.

The next morning, we head to Paris. We've been there before, but it was just for 2.5 days. This time we'll have 3 days to see some things we missed last time, like the Musee d'Orsay, the Eiffel Tower at night, the side and top of Notre Dame cathedral (we saw the front and the inside, but not the side or top last time, LOL), Sacre Coeur, a river Seine cruise, and a general wandering around the neighborhoods. We are staying right off Luxembourg Parc, so our opportunities for neighborhood wandering are excellent. We also get to have dinner at Taillevent one night, which we're hoping will be nearly as good as some of the great meals we had in Germany on our last trip.

After three nights in Paris, we drive back towards Germany via Luxembourg. We're going to visit Luxembourg City and see the Fortress and many of the other old buildings they have surrounding the town. We're hoping to have time to take the "Wenzel Walk," which is a self-guided tour through the history of the town. The town looks pretty amazing in the pictures I've seen. It's certainly nothing like what we can see on vacation here in the good old USA!

That night, we move to Trier to spend the night. We wanted to stay at least one night in a cute German hotel for one reason: THE BREAKFAST BUFFET!!! Germany has the most amazing breakfasts at the hotels. We're talking bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, dried meats, smoked salmon, fresh fruit juices, cheeses of all varieties, fresh jams and jellies, and the best hard rolls you've ever had, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Anyway, breakfast in Germany rocks! After breakfast, we'll spend our last day in Europe seeing the Roman ruins in Trier, then we'll drive up the Mosel river through wine country. We've been there before, but it's so beautiful and the little towns are so quaint that we wanted to see more. We'll stop at a winery that Jeff wants to visit, and then we'll end up back in Frankfurt for the night. We fly back home the next day.