It seems to me that Paris is a kind of reminder; a place that always brings memories to the surface, even if it is your first visit. Memories of movies set in Paris, or long-lost quotes about the city that you’ve heard, somewhere, sometime.

Let me begin by stating emphatically that if there is ever a time when I cannot be located, that my whereabouts are completely unknown, know that it’s because I have escaped back to the Yorkshire Dales, and hopefully, am never to be found.

One of our very favorite things to do is spend the holidays in a foreign place. I think it’s because we live in Texas, and so does my husband’s family; but my family is so far away, up in Michigan. Prices to travel up north during the holidays are always crazy – and so, in an effort to make neither set of parents jealous and somehow make both sets dissatisfied, we decided at some point to start holidaying abroad. This way, neither parent could accuse us of spending more time with one side of the family, and all parents would feel as though they’d been slighted somehow at Christmastime. A lose-lose, all around.

When I was in college, my mother took me on a trip from Flint to Chicago on the Amtrak train. I remember little to nothing about it, except the fact that we took the train instead of driving, and it stays in my memory as unremarkable, if nothing else.

I had been missing Northern Michigan fiercely. It’s hard to be away from home, and even my husband, West Texas boy that he is – he missed the Mitten, too. So, we planned a long weekend visit to my family in late August. Nothing special; just a weekend when we could find cheap flights. A little cooler weather to break the monotony of the unrelenting Houston heat and some time “Up North” to complete our summer.

One day during our trip to Valencia, my husband got it into his head to climb to the top of the Micalet. The Micalet is a cathedral in the center of Valencia’s old town that features a Gothic-style, octagonal bell tower and winding, spiral staircase with an ungodly number of stairs.

For our recent trip to London, at the top of the must-do list was taking the train from Waterloo to Hampton Court Palace. Of all the palaces in and around London, and there are a fair few of them, Hampton Court was really on my radar. For two Anglophiles like my husband and me, it seemed a Mecca, a holy grail of sorts for our interests. We’d watched so many BBC specials about the Tudor Monarchs, Castles of Britain, the Secrets of Hampton Court and all the like, that to actually have a ticket that would take us to a place almost mythical in its majesty seemed a dream come true.

Have you ever had it happen that a thing you imagined in your mind, something you saw with your heart and created within yourself … that this “thing” came true? A dream, or a setting of a place that you read about and pieced together and wished, wished, wished to someday explore for yourself, even though you knew it was not real, was made up. A place from a time long ago, a place that never was, a place that was no more, or had never been.

Èze. I’d never heard of it before, wasn’t even certain how to pronounce it. We found it by chance, just by zooming in and out on an internet map of the French Riviera. The images that came up on the search looked lovely, and on a whim, we booked a hotel and eagerly awaited our trip.

Monaco… the word alone conjures up images of James Bond movies, glamour and Grace Kelly, the Golden Days of Hollywood. Those images are not far off from reality – in fact, on my recent trip to this tiny city-state in France, all of those images became truer than I could have ever imagined.

It began in a wine cave.

My husband loves electronic dance music. The thumping beats, the unrelenting rhythm of the tempo, the way the music moves through your body almost to your core to the cadence of your heartbeat.