Pining for the Fjords

Greetings, everyone!  We hope you're having the happiest, loveliest, most merry of holiday seasons!  The effort to save the trees by creating a holiday blog instead of sending out a holiday card seemed decently well received last year , so here we go again! From our household to yours - happy holidays, all! Like last year, we've rounded up a few notable photos and events from each month; many of these are described in more detail in other blog posts, and if so, I've linked to those in each section. January 2023 In what I would imagine is common for many folks, during January, we stayed close to home, recovering from the 2022 holiday season (we hosted Amy's Mom for her birthday, Amy's Dad and his wife Risa for Christmas, and had a wonderful time celebrating with friends and family).  We ate at some great spots , hung out on our back porch and enjoyed the amazing Phoenix weather, and visited some local attractions, including the Japanese Friendship Garden  for their ...

In the penultimate post about our February trip to France, we spent the day wandering the Louvre and the streets of Paris, enjoyed high tea at Le Dali , and ate an amazing meal at Laserre ! Back in the sprawl of the Valley of the Sun The alarm went off early on Thursday morning (of course, I was already awake, having spent another not very restful night at the Hotel Saint Louis Marais - that bed was way too hard for my old hips), and we got to work showering, packing up the remainder of our luggage, and straightening up the room before we headed out.  Around 6:15am, we took the elevator downstairs to the lobby to check out and settle our bill, as well as await our car to Charles de Gaulle airport.  When we reserved a room at the hotel, they offered to also book us a shuttle for the early morning trip to CDG, and we happily accepted.  The charge for it was more than taking the RER line back, but it was far easier, and we were fine paying the difference to avoid navigati...

In Part 10 of the "trip to France" blogs, we lucked out and caught one of the only trains from Bordeaux back to Paris during a major transit strike, and we wandered our old stomping grounds, the Marais neighborhood. Posing with the Olympic Rings at the Hotel de Ville, Paris' city hall. The Summer Olympics will be here in 2024 Neither of us slept amazingly well from Tuesday to Wednesday at the Hotel Saint Louis Marais ; it was in a quiet area of town, but the quiet didn't extend to inside our room, as the faucet within the shower dripped all night (we closed the door and turned up the white noise machine, but still).  The mattress was also harder than we're used to, and after almost a week away, we were missing our bed something fierce.  Eventually, we started our day in earnest, taking showers and getting dressed, rolling out the door around 9am. I also had a pre-breakfast snack of roasted chicken Lay's, which I fell in love with when we visited in 2018. Thi...