Discount paris travel

Exorbitantly abroad with Mademoiselle du Pamplemousse

As we know, adventure travel is for neither the light of wallet nor the tender of foot. Lewis and Clark had a presidential letter of unlimited credit to help them stay the course to Cape Disappointment. Teddy Roosevelt's and Ernest Hemingway's safaris cost medium-size fortunes, allowing these glamorous sportsmen to bring back impressive numbers of hides and stuffed heads, not to mention provocative (in some cases, posthumous) accounts of exotic natives and landscapes, mind-bending amoebic dysentery, the occasional laughing hyena. Neil Armstrong had NASA behind him. And Reinhold Messner's more austere conquests of all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks have cost him six toes and a brother but have earned him the awe of his peers and the right to wax thanatological. "Death through exhaustion," he surmises, "is--like death through freezing--a pleasant one."

The common folk, too, have lately been flocking in Gore-Tex and khaki to the earth's far-flung wonders. Women have conquered the great peaks and rivers, and even I, at age forty-eight, scaled the Towers of Paine and ran the Double Drop of the Selway. In an era of guided treks and discounted airfares, however, intercontinental travel loses much of its cachet when too many groundlings begin to afford it. McMurdo Sound? Papua New Guinea? The moon? We've been there and done that. And siege-style expeditions, we hear, are so declasse; better to go in small groups or solo. These days we pack Canons instead of Mannlichers, bioSUEDE instead of buckskin, and subscribe to Outside instead of the slightly less P.C. White Hunter, but the principles of adventure travel remain the same: we want to prove our woman- or manhood in precarious but picturesque settings out of reach of the stiffs or the riffraff. Negotiating the Bio-Bio or Zambezi involves permits and visas and shots, risks loss of limb, and costs plenty. Ditto Ferrari's test track in Fiorano. Ascending K2 can cost 2K per diem, not to mention one's health and/or sanity, and the hard part is getting back down. Meanwhile weather tourists pay handsomely to be ushered into the paths of hurricanes and tornadoes. "I don't want to use the word `sexual,'" one confesses, "but there's something about the process of a hurricane that really appeals to me.

You can see it coming; you can feel it building; you can put yourself in as much danger as you want."

It was in much the same spirit that last July my wife, Jennifer, and I ventured forth on what many aficionados of the hair-raising consider the ultimate, even the downright reckless, in adventure travel: Paris with a very small child. Eight days shy of eleven months, our daughter, Beatrice, was crawling and able to walk only when clutching our index fingers. Although her vocabulary consisted of less than five words, she reveled in the power of language by shouting periodically at the top of her lungs. She was also in diapers, with zero interest in French architecture or cuisine, unable even to feed herself. And her mother was pregnant again. So all of this stood in our favor. We launched the expedition sans nanny or grandma, with little to aid us in navigating Paris's lunatic intersections and cobblestone rues besides Keds and a Baby Jogger, which we broke down and checked as luggage in its own color-coordinated packing sack. Instead of Jumars, crampons, and carabiners we packed wipes, size 3 Pampers, educational toys, and accoutrements. Bea's passport photo, taken four months earlier, suggests why her sobriquet during the trip was to become Mademoiselle du Pamplemousse, this after the tart but sweet citrus she would develop a taste for in Paris and of which her head was the same size and shape.

To boost the degree of difficulty further, Jennifer's mother had cashed in hundreds of thousands of TWA miles to provide us with three coach tickets--gratis perhaps, but still requiring us to fly from O'Hare to De Gaulle through TWA's hub in St. Louis. Grandma June met us there with a cache of necessities for the long flight ahead: cheese and crackers, water, gum, blue M&M's, and a motorized "toy" consisting of a raccoon's tail with eyes and a snout attached to a spasmodic green-and-yellow ball, batteries unfortunately included.

On the flight from St. Louis, Beatrice occupied herself for fifteen- or twenty-minute stretches by turning the duty-free catalogue into confetti, shredding stale rolls and grinding them into our Gore-Tex, and testing the range of her cries of bafflement at the demon raccoon. Stewards registered levels of 107 dB as far ahead as first class, even through the privacy/jealousy curtain, and up to thirty rows behind us. Although this flight lasted only eight hours--of which Beatrice slept about one and a half--the trip door-to-door took sixteen, plus twenty-two minutes and seventeen torturous seconds. The free tickets thus had been worth it.

We'd selected Paris over, say, Bumthang or Jalalabad or Orlando because of its reputation as the city where infants and their French-challenged parents were likely to be treated with the most withering hauteur. We also factored in the scarcity of high chairs in its restaurants, swings or grass in its parks on which it was legal for infants (or anyone) to crawl, and the ubiquitous E. coli-infested pigeon and dog shit, potentially lethal to infants. Our advance research also confirmed that although we'd be able to buy soy milk for Bea's bottles, few of the other foods she was accustomed to would be readily available. With possible allergic or other reactions around every corner, we prepared to depart with high hopes.

Yet in spite of our lust to be tested, we had made a last-minute concession: booking in advance, and into the Hilton on Avenue de Suffren no less. Steps from the Eiffel Tower and the Bir-Hakeim metro stop, the hotel was fraught with air-conditioning, cribs, complimentary buffet breakfasts, an ashtray on every table and in each of the elevators. By the standards established by the Trekking With Infants to Cultural Hotspots newsletter (TWITCH), any Hilton is thought to bespeak "an unintrepid softness of purpose." Worse, the flagrantly English-speaking staff allowed us to fill Bea's bottles with juice, to carry off extra croissants and mini-wheels of Baby bel, even to stash yogurt and fruit in our Tupperware. Jennifer and I persuaded ourselves that such shirking was justified only if what we saved on breakfasts and lunches was spent on a fancy dinner or two, where the Degree of Difficulty in Dining with Dignity would compensate for the Hilton's unseemlier perks. Plus wherever we dined, we still had to spend half our time retrieving foodstuffs and napkins and toys whipped by Mademoiselle du Pamplemousse over her shoulder, which by itself merits a respectable [D.sup.4] of 6.

When circumstances forced us to consume dejeuner in brasseries or cafes, we limited ourselves to a spartan variety of salads with french fries, ossified duck with french fries, tripe with french fries, and burgers with french fries. Mademoiselle du Pamplemousse, for her part, scarfed applesauce, grapefruit, and bananas mashed into yogurt, with french fries. And although they appeared on virtually every menu, all three of us managed, we think, to avoid french fries with burgers served oeuf a cheval.

Yet we still were determined to subject ourselves to a genuine 10-rated meal, the sort of experience usually reserved for those near-suicidal "thin air" fanatics who can give less insecure adventurers a bad name. In my case, it was sampling the degustation menu of Les Olivades while taking turns holding our daughter. Upping the ante still further, we dined there on only our second foray from base camp, when acclimatization was far from complete. Grouchy and disoriented, we even requested a high chair, which the earringed maitre d', already ruffled by the appearance of our so-called party of three, was desolated to inform us would be impossible. So far, so good. After hearing the specials recited in hasty French while spooning mashed peas into Mademoiselle du Pamplemousse, Jennifer made her selections: tomato and basil soup Provencal, tuna encrusted with sesame seeds and ginger, eggplant caviar. Already salivating at the ordeal a degustation menu surely held in store, I swept with my shoe a few shards from the flute of 1988 J. de Telmont that the Mademoiselle had just swiped to the floor. Watching the garcon sweep up the rest and then mop, I kissed Pamplemousse's sweet forehead and naively called for another.