In May of 2025 we finally revisited France and Germany after 10 years, with a few days in Prague and another in western Czechia in between. I had researched the relevant foodways, of course, but Europe is always hard for a vegetarian (Melissa) and southern Germany is terrible for a pescatarian (Lorna). Having no such restrictions, I could eat anything that I liked and I did, but I still lost 10 pounds from all the walking! The obvious conclusion is that, for health reasons, I should spend more time on vacation.
This trip had four parts:
- Northern France (Picardy, Normandy, Brittany, the Loire Valley, and Paris
- Prague and Karlovy Vary (a historic spa town, formerly Carlsbad) in Czechia
- Dresden (Saxony), Nuremberg (Franconia), and Munich (Bavaria)
- A special personal Proust Project add-on for me focusing on sites related to the Marcel Proust novel In Search of Lost Time.
In Search of Lost Time is a huge novel, about 3200 pages over seven volumes. It took Proust 10 years to write it and it was published over 14 years. I had read that massive work a couple of years ago. It took a year to read the whole thing! Naturally with that much room he was able to indulge in quite a lot of description and observation, and I wanted to see some of the places that he described.
This was a great project, although it got expensive at two points (one of them being tea at The Ritz, where I got this selfie). In the end I felt it was one of the best parts of the whole vacation. Every time I came up a site that he had described, huge sections of the story came flooding back into my memory, prompting me to look a little closer, or nearby, to look up some history or to ask about a person... each experience grew over time. Visiting these sites added much to my experience of the novel, and having read the novel added much to my enjoyment of the trip!
This was our itinerary: