My name is Kyla Gurganus, and I am a chemistry teacher from Ypsilanti, Michigan.  Every year since I started teaching, I have taken a big trip.  This year, I thought I had taken that trip in February, when I travelled to Madrid, Spain, during our mid-winter break.  It was during spring parent-teacher conferences, when the mother of one of my students mentioned a course she was teaching in Paris, that I reconsidered.  She got me thinking about travel and summer coursework (since school is never over for teachers).  While I did not end up deciding to take her course in Paris (deciding to take a course in Traverse City, instead), I did decide to travel to France and Spain this summer, flying into Paris and out of Barcelona, visiting places in the west, center, and south of France that I had never been to.

To get ready for my trip, I read the books Rick Steves' France 2009, Let's Go France 2009, and Rick Steves' Spain 2009, along with lots of websites.  I found a fare on Continental for less than $1000, too, which convinced me to go.  It was quite easy to make my train reservations on www.tgv-europe.com; just be sure to choose a country other than the US (I always choose Taiwan or Togo), and you can pick up your train tickets in any French train station with you e-mail confirmation and the original credit card.  (For this trip, it was cheaper for me to book individual point-to-point tickets than to buy a rail pass.)  I bought my train ticket from Collioure, France, to Barcelona, Spain, in Collioure.