As much as I fancy myself a contrarian—for a 40-year-old mother of two and recent-ish city expat to suburbia—like many basic women, I dream of Paris. The pull was perhaps never more magnetic than in recent years, when the pandemic grounded me with my two hellions—first, hyper-locally in a New York apartment, and then from traveling anywhere at all. It had been 10 years since my first and only long weekend in the City of Light, for my 30th birthday, when I’d ticked off all the touristy boxes—the Seine boat cruise, the shadow of the clock at Musee d'Orsay, dinner with my then-newly-married husband over the red-checked tablecloths at La Fontaine de Mars—but we ran out of time before we could do what I really wanted to do: wander around the Marais, languish at cafés, poke around for special vintage things and generally pretend to be Parisian.

My wanderlust began to bubble up last spring while reading Alyssa Shelasky’s memoir, This Might Be Too Personal, in which she shares romantic tales of pre-kid globe-trotting: riding a “fondue tram” in Switzerland; spontaneously relocating to Rome and riding on the back of a rakish boyfriend’s motorcycle. I rued throwing myself into work as a writer at a national news network immediately after college graduation, and not seizing that era of freedom and irresponsibility to travel more before proverbially settling down and becoming a wife and mother. It only occurred to me in hindsight (youth is wasted on the young, etc) that perhaps striving for conventional forms of achievement—even moving to New York, the city where I loved living for almost two decades—could wait unblocked games.