Between my junior and senior years in Landscape Architecture college at the University of Florida, the summer of 1990, I took advantage of the Studies Abroad program to spend four weeks in western Europe.

We started off in England, to get a bit used to being “strangers in a strange land” that at least by definition spoke the same language we did. My class was all male except me and another woman (Lynda), both of us older than traditional students, so we got to share a room over and over on this trip. Over the 28 days that we were in Europe, we visited England, Holland, Belgium, France, West Germany (it did not reunify until October 1990), Austria, Italy, and Switzerland.

France was amazing. We did a few side trips as a class taking the coach, taking the coach to places like Versailles and to Giverny (where Monet lived and worked), but two days were for us to explore Paris on our own. On one of those days, Lynda and I took the Metro to Île de la Cité to see the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris, then spent the afternoon at the Louvre Museum (neither of us were terribly impressed with the recent (1989) addition of the pyramid by I.M.