getting ready to head out

Here's the plan.

We leave Tuesday morning for Paris, expecting to arrive there Wednesday morning. We'll hop the train to Gare du Nord, and then wander around the neighborhood until noon, when we board the train north to Aachen, Germany.

By the time we get to our hotel in Aachen, we will have been travelling for far too many hours.

We'll be there until Saturday morning, with a few interesting sites and activities planned. We will take the bus to Maastricht, Netherlands, where we will board our barge for this 6-day bike-and-barge trip.

After that, it's the train back to Paris, for 5 days, then back home to Portland, via beautiful Charlotte, NC (4 hour layover). That should be a pleasant day, too.

It's a whirlwind, but we hope to see a lot of cool stuff, including the Lindt Chocolate factory outlet in Aachen (I have done my research well).

Our friend Robert will be staying at the house, watching the cats and supervising the finishing touches on our upstairs remodel, which has been going on for far too long, but that's another story.

I hope to do regular blog posts while we're travelling, so watch this space.

Now, if only the Dollar would continue to gain over the Euro, and that new Iceland volcano doesn't get too dramatic...