Moments of the Month | June 2019

You guys, my baby girl is in France right now.  Toulouse, to be exact.  She’s spending the year abroad in Spain and had some time between first semester finals and the start of second semester classes.  So she met her roommate in Toulouse and is going to wander around the south of France for a while.  I am soooooo jealous!  So.  To cope today, I’m going to do some catching up on my ((cough)) monthly ((cough)) Moments of the Month posts and share some favorite images from our big birthday weekend in Paris.  Trying to live a little vicariously I guess.

Paris was a fabulous way to spend a long weekend celebrating a joint big birthday with my favorite guy.

I can’t stop myself from photographing kiddos when I travel (or ever, really).  I’m always half waiting for an angry mother to come over and scold me in a foreign language, but I tell myself I’d jut offer her the picture if that were to happen, so I almost always succumb to the urge.A highlight of our trip was renting these little Lime scooters and jetting all over the city.  The scooters themselves were easy to manage, but the Parisian traffic was a bit scary at times. Since it was just the two of us, I considered breaking out of our norm of renting an apartment through AirBnB and getting a cushy hotel room, but when I checked the prices of decent Parisian hotels in June, I quickly changed my mind.  Yeesh, we could buy a LOT of French food and wine for the price of a ‘cozy’ hotel room.  An adorable studio apartment in the artsy Le Marais neighborhood (and EXTRA French food and wine) won the day.  You guys, EVERYTHING is beautiful in Paris.One highlight was a champagne cruise along the Seine.Another was just sitting at the sidewalk cafés for hours.  It’s so different from the sometimes assembly line experience of eating out here.  Sitting and sipping and chatting and people-watching is the norm and we never ever felt rushed.  And there were cute waiters who photobombed  as I tried to photograph the gorgeous window boxes across the street 😉We seem to have a talent for traveling to Europe during the hottest times in history.  Toward the end of our trip, it got so hot that they were canceling school and closing businesses.  I think this may have been the craziest heat wave since August of 2017 when — what do you know — we were in Tuscany for my Murphy cousins reunion!  We spent our last day in the air-conditioned Musee D’Orsay.

I’d been to Paris once before – toward the end of a month long backpacking trip in college.  My memories of that trip are great, but there’s no question in my mind that experiencing Paris on the budget of a joint 50th birthday celebration way surpasses experiencing Paris on the last pennies of a month-long backpacking trip at age 19.  I’ve added Paris to my list of places in the world I could visit and love again and again.

Other things happened in June, too.  Thank goodness for Instagram:

Thanks for looking,

~Jaye