This series

Over the last few decades, I've interviewed nearly 2,000 world travelers and adventurers. I am weaving the best of their nearly 10,000 fantastic travel tales into a psychology of travel as revealed by these very telling stories. These are travelers I've encountered on planes, trains, buses, ships, tours, safaris, and in campgrounds, hotels, restaurants, cafes, and pubs. These courageous travelers have freely shared their most personal travel experiences, some good and wonderful and others even horrific and life-threatening, which I, in turn, get to share with you now through my True Travel Tales series.

This Book

Travel Tales: France — Paris & the Riviera! is a collection of travel stories of one of the travel world's most favorite destinations, if not certainly among the world's handful of the most popularly visited places anywhere. Without a doubt, Paris is by far my favorite city, not only in Europe but in all the world. And I love France as well. And while modern Paris is always exciting for me to visit, it is the old Paris that remains particularly etched in my memories. To be sure, with its marvelous food and drink and phenomenal sights Paris and France certainly do not disappoint. Paris may very well be the most popular city in all of Europe as well as the rest of the world for that matter. The tales perhaps of what we eat and drink in France you will read or hear interesting and riveting tales of the wide variety of occasions where food and drink create for us such great memories of the best that the world of fine dining has to offer.

Indeed there are some ridiculous behaviors of the oft hilarious and embarrassing comings and goings of crazy stupit scoundrels on their (our) own National Lampoon-like (summer) 'Vacations' who cannot seem to help themselves (ourselves) by behaving at times as the ugly Americans who we sometimes cannot help but be! It is also one of our purposes of the True Travel Tales series to provide a cross-section of travel life in the world's most popular cities, along with the good comes sometimes a portion of the bad as well.

In the True Travel Tales series, we aim to pull no punches. You'll see the good and best sides of Paris and France, and you'll also perhaps sample some of the more discomforting or disquieting darker aspects as well that sadly are also part of the cycle of life in such a diverse metropolitan city as Paris.