The Yum Yum Factor

Sunset over the River Tagus I just got back from a ten day trip to Portugal - okay, it was actually eight days in Portugal and 2 days in Paris. I did things a little differently this time as I was taking my big sister with me to experience Europe for the first time and didn't want to be a slave to my notes. I was there in 2014 so I wanted to let her kind of set the tone and let's be honest, I will be back another time. Or two. Or three the view from the São Jorge Castle  This time, although I still had my lists and my custom made Google map which was basically my google map from 2014 with a whack of new and exciting places to eat and shops to check out, we ended up just kind of wandering around and everything worked out just fine. The intrepid adventurers I booked one activity in Lisbon and one in Porto, pre-booked all of our airbnbs and a train ticket to get us from Lisbon to Porto but, other than that, we just showed up. the magical Quinta de Regaliera...

The view from the 1st floor of the Eiffel Tower is stunning, even on a rainy, overcast day I lived in Paris for a time over 30 years ago, as a fresh faced, 20 year old Canadian girl on her first trip abroad, dreaming of a career as a high fashion makeup artist. Back then, you could truly live on a $10/day budget that included a bottle of wine and a little wheel of brie so, even if you felt lonely and isolated in a huge, foreign city, enduring rudeness that bordered on performance art , at least you could be spend the day pleasantly buzzed! The Eiffel Tower, lit up, will never stop being magnificent After a few months, being poor in this beautiful city started to weigh on me, I got sick of living off of bread and cart crepes, window shopping and eating pickled beets, so I moved on to Munich where I worked a lot more, made enough money to fund a nice life with new friends with ample left over for continued travel. Paris was not an easy city for a naive, young girl on he...