We had a splendid final night in Dublin, enjoyed our welcome drinks at the bar and had our first (very small) cooked breakfast in months on Monday morning at the Holiday Inn Express, Dublin city centre. And made a couple of bacon and sausage sandwiches to have for lunch. We arranged a 2 pm check out and ended up nattering with the GM for 10 minutes or so… There was an enormous taxi van in the rank just outside the hotel which was handy but the 15 minute ...

Saturday 8 January - Well here we are - unexpectedly back in Paris for a week. Never a hardship. We found an absolutely outstanding apartment on AirBnB. Our pre-Christmas stay was out in the 19th and whilst a wonderful apartment - a fairly dire location. This time around we paid (a bit) more and stayed in the 8th. Much better pricing than usual, probably due to the soaring Omicron numbers. We left Amsterdam with the sun rising over windmills on our left and ...

So. Paris. Finally. Short version? We came, we saw, we walked about 200km (at least), we dined out on luscious lunches and expanded our portfolio of lunch destinations substantially (Julien, Pharamond, Republique, Leon with more still to try). We got Covid booster shots, visited museums and indulged in Picard's best gourmet frozen food. We walked some more. We tried to go to a show, but were foiled by Covid. We enjoyed the Christmas decorations and lights and ...