Trip Report: Holidays At Home And New Years In Paris

Introduction

This last trip of 2011 (and first for 2012) started out with a stop in my hometown outside of Philadelphia to see my parents and family for the holidays before jetting off to Paris with my lovely wife to celebrate her 30th birthday (12/29) and to ring in the new year. We booked US Airways for our flights as I found a pretty good deal and I was hopping to use miles to upgrade us to Envoy Class (US Airways International Business Class) for at least the flight over and possibly the flight home. I also threw in a couple day stop in Philadelphia on the outbound so that we could visit my family for the Holidays.

While I got a good price on the flights, the hotels in Paris during that time of year were tres expensive. I decided to cash in some points for our hotels so we could stay right downtown. I didn’t have enough points with one hotel chain so I split it between the two. I booked one award night at the Hilton Arc de Triomphe and 2 nights at the Le Meridian Etolie (1 night award and one night paid.) The flight from PVD to PHL was uneventful as always, but for some reason they had that particular flight blocked out at 1.5 hours (when its maybe a 42 minute flight), so there was no surprise when we landed at PHL and the Captain came over the intercom announcing our 45 minute early arrival (which turned into a 35 minute early arrival as we had to wait to get to our gate.) We deplaned and walked out to meet my waiting parents curbside. The next couple of days were spent enjoying the company and companionship of my family.

I will break the rest of the trip report into the following sections.
-PHL Lounge Crawl
-US Envoy Class PHL-CDG
-Hilton Arc de Triumph Paris
-Touring Around the City of Lights
-Le Meridian Etois
-New Years Eve in Paris
-Departing CDG and the Star Alliance Lounge
-US Economy Class CDG-PHL-PVD
-Recap

A shot of all that I packed for my 9 day trip.