TRAVEL PLANNER FOR THE WIN!

I have never used a travel planner before since, well, since I am married to THE biggest planner on earth. But when you have 3 kids in 2 schools playing 5 sports and none of your kids can drive and you and your husband work full time+ at your start up, well, when you are tackling 3 weeks in Europe, you get a planner. And OMG I will never take a trip again without consulting her. Period.

I wish I had the wherewithal upon landing in Paris to take a picture of the THOUSANDS of people standing in line to go through customs...a line that was easily 4 hours long. I am not even exaggerating, which we all know I love to do, but this time I mean it.

Instead, we deplane, and there is a gentleman standing there with an electronic sign that says "Shawn Boyer". Hell. Yes. Not only was this needed since we were all basically in a zombie state and just walking our bodies in a forward motion, but because this gentleman proceeds to literally walk us by ALL THE PEOPLE. Straight to the front. He takes our passports and hands them to the person in the box, he looks us over, scans them, hands them back and we walk through. "Welcome to France", says our guide. Katherine Gould if I could see you right now, I WOULD KISS YOU.

When we got to the front of the line, Luke looked at me and said "I am feeling a love/hate thing here...I am glad we aren't waiting in that line but it was so embarrassing watching everyone stare at us while we walked past them all like we were better." We definitely got some looks and I am sure people were thinking, um, not a one of them is remotely celebrity looking. Well, except maybe for Shawn and Macy who still manage to look beautiful at all times.  I looked like I crawled out of a ditch after a two day bender. 

Whatever we paid for that, well, it was worth every penny. So that is my first tip on this trip...don't get the salad at McDonald's. Every goGetter hears me say that daily as it's my standard line on sales calls...meaning, use a product for what its specialty is...don't try and make it work for another use case. While Shawn is a great planner, Shawn doesn't specialize in planning trips to France and Italy. And Katherine does. Shawn is the salad. Katherine is the big mac. Or fries if you're me. Freaking best fries on the planet to this day.

Her other pro tip was don't give into the jet lag, which was smart, and it showed up hard core at dinner, thus the pictures of the boys at the dinner table. :) They plowed through, both of which had heroic attitudes the whole time too, and we ate a fabulous meal and came home and I slept for 14 hours. Glorious. It's 12:32pm and I am having to go wake the boys up because we are off to a half-day tour of Honfluer & Deauville on the Normandy Flowery Coast. 

There have already been some fun memories made...including when my mom asked our guide at the Monet Gardens where he painted Starry Night. "That was Van Gough" she said. LMAO. You know, she was tired and all but so freaking funny.  When I was drenched in sweat and exhausted and DONE with Monet, and we were crammed into his old air conditionless house with 80 other people, I looked up at one of his paintings of a naked woman slumped over on a stool and told my mom, "that's gonna be me when I get to the hotel." We almost peed our pants laughing. We were just DONE. Loved Monet but done for the day.

Off to get ready for Day 2, at 12:40pm. Gosh I love vacation.