Our first meal since arriving was at this little cafe on Place de la Bastille, right near our apartment. We had the onion soup and some French bread- very good! We think we'll be sampling lots of onion soup during our stay in Paris. Au Revoir, R&S

This is the Place de la Bastille entrance to our street, Cour Damoye. There is a similar entrance from a smaller street at the other end of Cour Damoye, which is actually closer to our building. The gates are locked at night, so we swipe the lock with an electronic key to get in. We're on the 3rd floor (which most Europeans actually call the second floor because the ground floor or first = 0, the 2nd floor = 1, and the 3rd floor = 2). Anyhow, we're really glad we...

We departed Miami at about 6:00 PM Friday and deplaned at Charles DeGaulle Airport at 9:30 AM Saturday. It was an uneventful, fairly pleasant 9.5 hours on the plane, even though the leg room wasn't so good, and the food about the same. Our apartment is on Cour Damoye (pronounced "Damwa"), which is a gated little cobblestone street that you enter between two cafes on the Batille traffic circle. In the photo, Steve is at the door of our building: Philosophes J.

Aug. 31, our bon voyage date, will be upon us before we know it. We just got an email from our Paris landlord, Melinda, who helped us set up transportation from Charles DeGaulle Airport with our driver, Laurent. It's a good thing Steve likes taking care of all these details, because Renee does not. Steve's been reading "The Sweet Life In Paris: Delicious Adventures in The World's Most Glorious and Perplexing City" by David Lebovitz, an American chef who went t...

It's only March 10 and we have 6+ months until we fly to Paris. Of course, we are already getting excited about it, and we've done some of the preparation: we've rented an apartment, we've made flight reservations, and we've bought travel insurance. Now, we're trying out this new blogsite, "OffExploring.com" and it seems promising. We liked "MyTripJournal.com" that we used last year for our stay in Florence, but they weren't able to make a book of our all of our ...