All posts tagged: london

international day trips from paris

The Best International Day Trips From Paris by Train (2020)

One of the best things about the City of Light is how easy it is to make international day trips from Paris by train. That’s definitely not something I grew up with: You can make an international trip from New York City by train — but only if you want to go to Montreal, and only if you have at least three days, because it’s a 12-hour trip each way. From Paris, you can reach London by train in a little over two hours. Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and others aren’t much farther.

Hiking the Thames Path: Day One

I am hiking the Thames Path, a path that follows the Thames for 180 miles, from the Thames Barrier in London to its source, near Cirencester.  Day One: Paris to Vauxhall I do not remember the last time I was so excited to do something I couldn’t sleep the night before — which is difficult, because it means you are excited to do something having slept the hours of 2 to 5 the previous night, and you make questionable decisions like not bringing your sunglasses. Also, you are very tired, in that wiry, jittery way. But who cares: I am hiking as much as I can of the Thames Path before I need to return to France in five days: Sunday to Friday.

This Week’s Free Map: London

This week’s map is London! London’s the greatest, and it is also the city that greeted Major Charity Adams (later lieutenant colonel, just FTR) with a Buzz Bomb. To learn more about Charity Adams, I strongly recommend her autobiography, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC or Double Victory: How African American Women Broke Race and Gender Barriers to Help Win World War II. To download the map, shown below, just click here. Save it, print it out and frame it — it’s distressingly indistinguishable from a screenprint. The better quality the printer, the better quality the print, though even a super-cheap printer (like mine) will do a half-decent job. Each map is only available for free for a week, so download away.