Return to Master Journal Index 
European Vacation 2006

The following is the links to the pictures for each day.  If you'd like to read the description, it's at the bottom of this page.  Each day also has a description at the bottom for that day.

All in all we went picture crazy and took 2,973 pictures, nearly 3GB of images.  This page is only including the highlights, which is only 141 of the images, plus 10 photos taken by the guides and given to us as printed images.
 

Day 1 - Cheerio

This was the day we arrived in London, checked into the Renaissance Chancery Court hotel, met both of our adventure guides, and then had a traditional English dinner while being entertained by the Pearlies. (11 photos)

Day 2 - Jolly Holiday

Breakfast at the Pearl Restaurant, Westminster Abbey, Horse Court, Buckingham Palace, had an English tea luncheon, dinner at the Soho Hunting lodge, saw the London musical Mary Poppins. (16 photos)

Day 3 - The Royal Treatment

London Eye, cruise down the Thames River, tour through the Tower of London, the British Museum, and then we wandered into China Town.

Day 4 - Crumpets To Croissants

Walk through Lincoln’s Inn Field, boat cruise on Regents Canal, Waterloo Station for a Eurostar train ride through the Chunnel to Paris, and explored the Arc de Triumph.

Day 5 - Drawn To Bohemia

Notre Dame Cathedral, Montmartre, Montmartre Vinyard, Wine Tasting, Eiffel Tower

Day 6 - Parisian Palette

Paris city walk, Louvre, dinner at Bistro Les Petits Carreaux

Day 7 - High Society

City walk through the Tuileries Gardens, Château de Versailles, biking through the Gardens of Versailles, farewell dinner at La Duree

Day 8 - Au Revoir

Depart to return home.


Photos supplied by our adventure guides.

This year we decided to go to Europe.  I’ve been promising my wife to take her for years.  I decided to go with a preplanned vacation package because of lack of time to plan the trip.  We were really pleased with our Disneyworld trip last year, and so I decided to give the Adventures by Disney a try.  I thought it was rather expensive, but figured Disney would give us a good vacation.  After the fact I think the money was well spent, and would wholeheartedly recommend them to anybody.  The trip was first class from beginning to end.  The only complaint about the trip I would have would be the current rules & regulations on international travel, which obviously Disney can’t do anything about.

All through the trip the guides referred to the trip as an “adventure”.  At first I thought this was just lip service to the “Disney way” of doing things, but about halfway through the trip I started seeing it and appreciating it.  I don’t really have a way of explaining it.  But now I’m looking at the other Disney Adventures and see where else I want to go.

The adventure was a group of people, they tell me that they normally have 30-40 “adventurers”, but our group was a small group of only 14, probably because of all the international problems of late.  In addition to the 14 “adventurers” we had 2 adventure guides, Roni & Alex (short for Alexandria).  Then in each city we had a local guide that would guide us, and tell us history and all that stuff.  In London it was Steven, and in Paris it was Helene, but she had to leave early and the last day was Thomas. 

Each day we were given our schedule for the next day as well as an adventure pin (pictured above to the left of each days description.)  The guides did a fabulous job of making it so we didn’t have to worry about what was coming next, just make sure we were ready to go when it was time, and they would take care of everything else.  At first this was very disconcerting, because I have such an alpha personality, my natural instinct is to be involved in planning and stuff.  But Alex and Roni did a terrific job of making me (and all of us) trust them and leave everything to them.

The other thing that occurred was that all of the adventurers became sort of a family away from home.  The first day everyone was sort of reluctant to get to know each other.  After a few days though we got to know each other so well that we started talking about future vacations together, and trying to figure out how to make sure our guides Roni & Alex were with us.
 


Return to Master Journal Index