Just a quick bonjour today, Reader—

My parents are visiting this week (on their way to Gabon to see gorillas! 😮), so I’ve been taking advantage of having an excuse to get out and explore.

You know how it is: you have the whole city at your doorstep, yet day after day you get sucked into whatever’s on your computer screen ...

So when Mom said she wanted to walk around, I was happy to oblige.

I took her to my favorite kitchen store (not Dehillerin!), where I picked up a few things; a super-specialized shop selling gift boxes, paper, ribbon, and jewelry store supplies, which she loved; and an over-200-year-old confectioner that makes Victor Hugo’s favorite cherry-flavored candies.

She had never been to the Palais Royal, one of my favorite places in the city. There, we discovered a jewel-box of a shop I had never noticed before that sells one thing: watercress vodka. The shopkeeper told us they just got featured on the cover of Architectural Digest!

And I’m not usually a vodka drinker, but the sample she gave us was SO SMOOTH, we naturally had to buy a bottle.

Mom wanted to visit Sennelier, the revered art supply store, and since I hadn’t been yet, I was happy to take her there. We had fun picking out pastels for her artist friend and browsing the inks and giant rolls of papyrus upstairs.

I suggested a high-end paper store that I’d walked by but never gone into. We admired the handmade papers and journals, then wandered a couple of doors down into an engraving shop. One find kept leading to another, which is exactly what makes wandering around Paris (or any city!) so much fun.

Spending the afternoon with my mom reminded me that no matter how well you know a place, there’s always something new to discover. Sometimes all it takes is seeing it through someone else’s eyes.

That’s one of my favorite parts of helping people plan their trips, too: matching them with places they’d probably never find on their own, but that end up becoming the stories they tell when they get home.

If you’d like that kind of matchmaking for your next trip, book a call and let’s talk about where you’re going.

P.S. Nobody likes to come home from a trip and learn about some really cool thing they missed because they didn’t know about it (I call it DOMO: “dislike of missing out”). Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen on your next trip!