Upcoming Trips

I'm not really interested in the European tradition of taking one month off a year to go sit on the beach somewhere. For starters, I can't take one month off from work. I work for myself and my marketing campaigns need fairly constant monitoring. I can take a few days off or even a week but a month is out of the question.

Secondly, I can't think of anything worse than sitting on a beach or visiting just one place for a month. How boring! I like to visit cities where I can walk around the old streets, visiting cafes and little shops, learning about the history of the city and the people. That's my idea of a holiday and that's why I like to live in Europe.

Three or 4 days is generally enough to visit one city although a week is better for great cities like Rome or Sydney and a lifetime is possibly not enough for the best city of them all - Paris. So over the next couple of months I have booked a few short city trips. I took advantage of the discount tickets on offer on the new TGV Est and have tickets for:

• Luxembourg
• Strasbourg
• Stuttgart

Then I'm supposed to be going back to Australia for a visit but I haven't booked that as I really don't want to go. My parents have offered me their frequent flyer points to book the trip so it's not going to cost me anything so I can't use lack of funds as a reason not to go. I suppose if I got a job I wouldn't be able to take time off. Do I really want to take that drastic action?