Itenerary and links

As mentioned before here is our itinerary: We leave next Tuesday in the afternoon, 6:40pm local time. It is quite convenient that we'll be flying "overnight" and therefore arriving around 9:30 am in Paris. CMS tells me that should minimize jetlag if one is able to sleep through the flight. The first leg of our trip is four days in Paris, our specific schedule of activities is still to be determined.

On the 28th we take a train to Grenoble where we'll be staying with an old friend of CMS who has been kind enough to take us in an offered to show us around. He also helped us get the train tickets to his current city of residence at an incredible prize. Grenoble is in the South-East of France, close to the borders with Switzerland and Italy. It is a region I am looking forward to visit. Hopefully we'll be doing some hiking.

On the 2nd of August we take a plane from Lyon (France) to Brussels (Belgium). It is the cheapest way to travel, unlike the $19 "seat sales" for flights within Canada that end up being a hundred dollars or more we really got a deal. For both of us it will be cheaper than one person going from Toronto to Montreal.

In Brussels we take a regional train to a university city called Leuven, about 30 min. east of the Belgian (and EU) capital. Leuven is the home of the oldest Catholic university in the world, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL). There we will be hosted by a friend of mine and his wife (thanks Jorge!) whom I met in Montreal last Summer at the International Meeting of the Psychometric Society. After a couple of days and a couple of nights we return to Brussels for an overnight visit previous to taking a train back to Paris (another bargain thanks to a 48hr sale). I would've loved to have more time to visit both Leuven and Brussels, but it would have to be for a future trip. In Paris we stay a few days more before taking our plane back to Toronto on 08/08/07.

I have added some links on the right-hand sidebar, which I think will be useful for our trip. I discovered a neat feature of Google Maps called My Maps where I was able to enter several important addresses for our trip; I'll report if and how was useful. I added some other potential useful links. Under "Keeping connected" the links e-mail portals (ah, and of course Facebook). I hope having them on one page will save us time entering full urls when using Internet cafés and what-not. If you can think of any link or site that might be useful while abroad, just post it as a comment.