Planning ahead

Written 9 August 2023

In keeping with David's determination to travel as much as we can before we're too old and feeble, we're doing a second European trip this year—a week in Paris on our own and a couple weeks in Italy on our first land tour, with Tauck. We've signed up for the "small group" option on the "Classic Italy" tour—Naples to Venice (map below).

Over the years, David has become even more enthusiastic about eating well in France, and particularly in Paris restaurants, than I am, so as usual, he compiled a list of candidate restaurants at which we should try to reserve. The reservation process falls to me, but it's been a while since I've had to go through this routine—when we go on, e.g. Viking cruises, and presumably on the Italian section of this trip, all the planning is taken care of by the tour company. I was a little annoyed, when I started the reservation process in April, as I usually do, that the majority of restaurants in Paris, although they've added slick reservation options to their websites that save me many a phone call, now take reservations only a couple of months in advance. (One, which doesn't limit reservations, was already booked solid through December; scratch that one.) So I could only reserve a few and had to wait until August to do the rest. If they were all consistent about it, I could just line them up and do one a day, in the order we plan to visit them. That's less convenient than doing them all at once in a morning, but it's at least predictable. But no, some will take them three months out. And "two months" is a little squashy—some open reservations for 4 October on 5 August, as I would expect, but some open them on 4 August. And these are places that book up in under 24 hours, so it makes a difference. One even opens a whole month of dates at a time, as soon as the first of that month is two months ahead.

And our credit-card company, always on guard, freaks out the first time they get a bill from outside our usual ambit, sends us a fraud alert, and blocks any further such charges. We try to let them know in advance, but when we have to do it in dribs and drabs on different dates, they forget and freak out all over again. This time, they put the block in place, but they never sent the fraud alert, so I wasn't able to tell them it was okay! We put our broker on the problem, his office was able to straighten it out for all but one restaurant, whose third-party reservation service still won't accept our card and therefore won't book the reservation. When I telephoned the restaurant, I got a nice young woman who explained that she was only there to answer the phone and tell callers that the restaurant is closed for another two weeks for their annual vacation. She couldn't make reservations, but she could take our request and have them call me back when they reopened, meanwhile, others with local Paris credit cards are presumably reserving all the tables on our date, so my only hope for that venue is that the third-party reservation company is malfunctioning and blocking everybody else too. Even with all this, at two of the restaurants, we had to book the lunch slot because the dinner slots were all taken.

Seems to me there's an open niche here for a concierge reservation company. You open an account with them. They verify your credit card at leisure, in advance. You send them a list of your desired restaurants and dates, and they (keeping careful track of every restaurant's policy, and hitting the restaurants' reservation sites just after midnight Paris time on the opening day if necessary) make the reservations using their own credit card, which they have made sure will work in the right places at the right times. They then total up all the deposits they had to put down (if any; some restaurants just want the card on file so they can charge a penalty if you don't show up) plus a fee for their services and charge your credit card for the total. Do travel agents already do that?

Anyway, the next step was to look into what we wanted to do between meals. The Musée Carnavalet (history of the city of Paris through art) has finally reopened after years of renovation. It is conveniently located a block or two from one of our lunch-time restaurants, and admission is free, so we can start in the morning, go out to lunch, and come back in the afternoon to finish up. We've been there before, but not for decades.

Imagine my surprise at discovering that the special exhibition at the Louvre is masterpieces from the major art museum in Naples! Perfect! We will surely get to visit the museum in Naples the following week and will find all those masterpieces missing, but we will have seen them a few days early in Paris!

The Petit Palais (City of Paris's Museum of Art) special exhibition will be "Nuits Corticales" (Cortical Nights); the photos look bizarre but intriguing.

The Grand Palais (unclassifiable as far as I can tell) is closed for renovation, but they will be doing Immersive Mucha, which sounds great—I love Art Nouveau—at a different venue, over by the Bastille Opera. They'll also have a temporary venue—a vast tent—set up over by the Eiffel Tower, but nothing is scheduled to be there when we are.

The Atelier des Lumières will be doing "Chagall and Klee"—hmmm, maybe . . .

The Musée du Luxembourg will be doing "Picasso and Gertrude Stein"—another definite maybe . . .

The Marmottan and Jacquemart-André will be between special exhibitions, but we still have a few places we've never visited, like the Museum of Counterfeiting and the Museum of the Postal Service (also finally reopened after renovation).

Written 10 September 2023

Whew, the reservations are all made. Remember the restaurant that was closed for another two weeks and would call me when they reopened? Well, they didn't, but I had left our desired reservation info with the nice phone receptionist, so a day or two later, I called them, and miracle of miracles!, our reservation was there on the books, just when we wanted it!

Then I sat down with restaurant reservations, museum closing days, special exhibition dates and hours, transportation constraints, etc., and played Tetris with the schedule for the week. I think I've got it all laid out—reserved slots with entry times for the items we really don't want to miss—with some slack allowed for exhibitions or other attractions we only find out about on the spot.

Then we fly to Naples to rendezvous with Tauck. Should be an adventure. Here's that route map.

Written 1 October 2023

We usually fly to Europe directly from Atlanta, either to Paris CDG or to Amsterdam Schipol, but this time, for reasons known only to Delta Airlines and possibly our travel agent, we flying from Atlanta to Raleigh-Durham and then from there to Paris CDG. Whatever.

As it happens, although I've never made connections there, I have frequently flown into and out of RDU—it's my home-town airport. I left from there, with my family, for a visit to my Massachusetts grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins, the very first time I ever got on an airplane (in the days when the gates were just that—literal gates in the waist-high fenced enclosure that kept waiting passengers from wandering onto the runways. I flew in and out when I went off to college and came home for vacations and summers. I've flown up there and back again about once a year since we've been in Florida, to see my father and brother (convenient since, for a long time, my father and his wife owned a used bookstore in terminal 2 and were there anyway). In my childhood, it was even a source of entertainment. A cheap family outing was to drive over and park in the waste land just outside the fence around the runways to watch the planes land and take off. So although it's not my favorite layover destination, I at least know it well; the food's better in Atlanta.