French Riviera

When it comes to beaches and beach destinations, Europe is not on the obvious vacation list for most Americans, who prefer either their highly priced domestic beach spots or the convenient and affordable Mexico and Caribbean, only hours away by plane. Yet Europe has a few aces up its sleeve, from the beautiful Greek Isles and Spain's Ibiza and Mallorca to the French Riviera and the Dalmatian Coast.

This past Sunday, the New York Times has dedicated a long travel article to the French Riviera (or rather, NY Times contributor Seth Sherwood in his The Barefoot Riviera).

The author focuses on the not-so-glamorous, yet charming towns of Villefranche-sur-Mer, Eze, Cagnes-sur-Mer - Côte d’Obscure, as he calls them. These towns are withing miles of glitzy Nice, which in turn is only a few hours by TGV from Paris, should you choose to venture past Paris while in France.

On this French Riviera note, EuropeanDestinations.com has a 6-night package Paris - Nice - allowing any traveler to spend three nights in Paris for a tour de force through its museums and cafes, and three nights in Nice (again, TGV proves to be a great travel resource). While in Nice, don't forget to rent a car and explore all these more unknown towns of the Riviera. You will discover plenty of places to write home about.

Eurotripper - what's this all about?

Well, we can say this is a blog about Europe or Europe travel. It does not matter. If we are to look for a goal for this blog - it's to simply introduce Europe to the American traveler, maybe in a way that it was not presented before (unless you bought a guide to every country in Europe from one of the companies publishing them: lonely planet, frommer's, etc. I have my favorites when it comes to guides, and I am sure everyone who has ever used at least one guide has their. Bottom line, every guide is pretty much written by a human being, edited by human beings, who inadvertently add their own bias or subjectivism to the pages you read. Bottom line, I only have a vague idea where this will take me or take its readers.

So why start a blog about Europe? For spamming purposes? After all, there are thousands of blogs to be started daily - just like there are thousands of users joining myspace at someone's invitation, without becoming engaged in the website. Let's just say that I want to promote one idea and one company - which I think is pretty good at customizing travel to Europe. So this is a word of caution - but I promise not to spam. Enjoy.