Parisviewing Incomplete

Tough times have been reached. We have realised that our travel method is not as flexible as we previously thought. We have had to miss some really good Paris time because of that.

We are not very flexible because: we need to be able to walk to our accomodation (This limits us to the centre of the city or near adequate transportation), we are on a tight budget (no fancy rooms), we are a couple (We don't like sleeping in seperate beds to the point where we sleep on the bottom bunk, and we'd rather have a private room). So we have fewer options than we really could have and going somewhere without accomodation is not the best idea. In Belgium, I believe we hit the point where reservations became compulsory.

We have grown slightly tired of big cities (to which we are limited by the eurail pass), however the coasts are getting packed by the europeans themselves. We thought Spain would be cheap but we had better bargains in Greece and Italy. And finding information for Spain is quite difficult, the internet has helped us a bit but sorting through the trash takes time.

After some delicious croissants, Dasha and I decided to take the day to review our pictures from the trip and eliminate the bad ones. It took us several hours to go through all 1600 but it reenergised us for the next two months of travel; we have seen so much in so little time! After some more delicious food courtesy of mom and dad, we took the 11pm bateux mouche on the seine and saw paris at night, then we hung around the eiffle tower until they turned off the lights.

This morning we had more croissants before saying bye bye to mommy and daddy (who spoiled us rotten and let us stay in the appartment one more night). We decided to plan our next move which proved difficult as shown above, and have spent the whole day toying with scheduals and trying to find accomodation that suits our needs and is close to a train station or bus stop. We only left the appartment to go to the train station to buy our nighttrain to Madrid. We leave at 23:11 from Paris and arrive 13:53 in Madrid. We wanted to leave tomorrow night but there is a general strike on and the ticket guy told us that was not a good idea. Tomorrow morning I go and try to get a hostel for one night then go buy croissants before handing the keys to this cute place to the next customer. We still have lots of paris to see and hopefully the extra two days will allow us to see it.

Another bit of news we have purchased tickets to Tomorrowland on July 27 in Boom, Belgium for electronic music from noon until midnight! We will make Antwerp our homebase and train to Boom then either taxi or relax until the first train back. Big DJ's like Armin Van Buuren, Above&Beyond, and many others will be there. We won't fit in but we will surely have fun. The rock concert sadly did not work out.