European Wanderings

I was working at a company north of Paris (20 miles) yesterday and made the decision to remain in Paris for the night and come back today to Frankfurt. While I usually travel alone, this time I was with two coworkers and one of them had never seen the Eiffel Tower. Normally I would have had dinner and gone back to the hotel room to work but he convinced me to go with him to the tower. And I am so glad he did. The tower was beautifully lit with sparkling lights all over it (like Cinderella's castle at Disney) and was a sight to behold.

However, coming into the city may not have been the best choice in the world. The traffic was miserable coming into the city at 6 pm yesterday and took us 90 minutes in a taxi from the hotel to the office. If I knew Paris a little bit better I would have taken the Metro. Oh well...

Tomorrow, Friday, the family and I are driving up to the Netherlands to the city of Keukenhof. This is apparently one of the most beautiful places in the world where the fields and fields of tulips bloom in April. There are flower parades and an amusement park all dedicated to the flowers blooming. While there we hope to spend some time in Amsterdam and a beach on the North Sea. We are staying with a family with two girls (7 and 5) - he's British and she is Dutch - that we met while sitting waiting for the Main Street Parade in Euro Disney in November.

And lastly, the company I worked at yesterday is 300 meters from where the Concorde crashed in 2000 upon take off from Charles de Gaull, killing all 113 people on board. There is still a huge hole and field, cordoned off by razor and barbed wire and small monument in the parking lot of the restaurant/hotel next door where we ate lunch. Awfully eerie to be eating lunch looking out at a field where a major airline disaster occurred.