Throwing My Arms Around Paris in 2010
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
I hadn’t planned to take the side trip excursion to Paris, France during my weeklong visit to England, mostly because I had already been there before. This may sound silly, but if I had intended to go, the number one reason would be to visit the Hard Rock Cafe. So I nearly almost passed up the trip even when circumstances (namely a couple who had signed up for the trip never made it to England) allowed me to go for free, because I knew there wouldn’t be an opportunity to get to the Hard Rock during our brief guided tour of the city. But there was one specific thing that I had not accomplished the last time in Paris, and this tipped the scales in favor of me going to Paris again. Bob passed on the opportunity although I tried my damnedest to get him to go. Read the rest of this entry »
After a week of laundry, packing, and cleaning as I prepared for my house guest who would return with me, I was ready to hop on that plane Friday morning, April 23, 2010, and head to California for the second time this year. The 
Since we had just moved into our new Beavercreek home on Winterset Drive, and in the midst of decorating the house and erecting a new two-car garage, we didn’t do much extensive vacationing during the Summer of 1978. In fact, for the first trip that we took, we didn’t even leave the state. We headed north east to Youngstown, Ohio for the annual convention of the HET (Hudson Essex Terraplane) club – offically known as the 19th Annual Central National Meet. This national meet was held in a hotel district that included a Holiday Inn, a Days Inn, and a Motel 6. Dad is fairly certain that we stayed in the Holiday Inn, where the central headquarters was located. The dates of the convention were July 26-30, but we probably didn’t stay for all of the days. 
With a grand total of about five hours sleep, my night’s rest on Monday, going into Tuesday, March 30, 2010, held the record for the most consecutive minutes of shut-eye during the week of my London trip. Bob and I got up that morning at around 6:30am, got ready, and headed down to the continental breakfast in the basement floor of the Central Park Hotel. I was very disappointed that it was so skimpy. For some reason, I had expected the amazing buffet that we had gotten in Guatemala and I had seen in many of the hotels in Europe. But this week, I survived on a couple of buttered croissants and the occasional bowl of mushy raisin and bran cereal.