A travel mishap, a box of author copies, and twenty-four hours in the 7th that I never planned to have

Stone-etched ring with Paris Highlights - It is one of my favorites

The best thing I have done for this trip so far is cancel the part I was most excited about.

My author copies of The Paris Habit arrived yesterday. 🎉

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I opened the box, stacked them on the table, admired them for roughly four minutes, and then went back to the corner of my desk where my September trip was quietly unraveling.

It started with a slightly odd email, then a second, slightly odd email, and by the third, I understood that I had been sitting on a reservation at a supposedly luxury property that was not making me feel very special.

I was very pleased with my original plan

Months ago, when I was building this trip around a stubborn goal (seven days in Paris for under a thousand dollars, which deserves its own post and will get one), I decided that Mabel and I would spend one night outside the city. Somewhere old, with a forest. A splurge-worthy night without the actual splurge, which is my favorite category of travel and also the one most likely to go sideways, because, like my dad was fond of saying, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Agree to disagree, Dad.

I found an abbey about an hour outside Paris, tucked into an ancient forest, and I felt extremely clever about it for nearly five months.

Then I wrote to ask how one actually gets there and back, and whether I could make a dinner reservation, etc etc.

What came back was wrong. Not off by a little, wrong in the way that tells you nobody on the other end has looked at your booking or even paid attention to your inquiry email. They did not seem to know who I was - not in a Karen way, but in a ‘do I actually have a reservation’ kind of way. And then, apparently as a next step, they sent Mr. White a questionnaire so long and so probing that I sat there genuinely wondering why an abbey in the woods needed information I would think twice about handing to my accountant.

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The rabbit hole

So I decided to take action: go read what other people have said recently. Not the glossy, probably aged reviews on their website. The ones from this summer.

The 2026 reviews were rolling in, and they were not complimentary.

I got that agitated feeling. Anyone who has driven any distance knows it. The one where you can see, several miles ahead, that the road is filled with red taillights, and you have exactly one comfortable opportunity to make a hard left or U-turn before you are stuck.

This was already going to be an effort. Trains, transfers, a bag we would have to drag out of Paris and back into it, all so we could sleep one night in a forest. Adding “and the hotel may be a mess” to that equation was the end of the conversation going on in my head.

I canceled. The relief was immediate and slightly embarrassing in its intensity.

The hard left

Most people do not cancel. They get the same feeling I got, and then they set up to do battle instead. They draft the firm email. They start rehearsing what they will say at the front desk. They decide they will make it work, because they have already paid and already told everyone, and backing out feels like admitting the whole thing was a mistake.

I have been doing this long enough to see the bad coming. So my first move is never the firm email; it is the cancellation policy. In this case, I was still inside the window, and the whole thing cost me nothing but an afternoon.

I did not eat a cancellation fee, and I am not sure suffering is the right word either. It is subtler than that. When you plan two off-the-beaten-path days on purpose, the whole point is that they unfold around you, effortlessly, like a well-rehearsed concerto you get to sit inside. So when it starts unraveling before you have even left the house, that is worth paying attention to.

Something always goes wrong on a trip. Strikes, weather, the handwritten closed sign on the door of the place you crossed an ocean to see. None of that is mine to control. The setup is. I would rather build something solid enough that when the inevitable turns up, it lands on steady ground instead of piling onto a thing that was already wobbling.

And then I looked up, and there was the book, sitting on the table, looking at me the way Triscuit and Maya look at me when I am holding their leashes and not moving fast enough toward the door.

Enter the 7th

The last time Mabel and I were in Paris together, which was her first trip, she never saw the Eiffel Tower up close. Not once. We were busy, we were eating, we were on my beaten path, and somehow a woman went to Paris and came home having seen the most famous structure in the world only from a moving taxi.

No nighttime sparkle. No standing underneath it and getting a crick in her neck. No walking up. No comedy of keeping one hand on her bag at Trocadéro while a man tries to sell her a keychain shaped like the thing she is currently standing in front of.

I took that photograph on a six-week stay with my kids when they were seven and twelve. Six weeks. We saw everything, and then we saw a good deal of it again, and not one of us was above a rack of tiny metal towers going five for a euro. That was twenty years ago, which is the other thing the photograph tells you.

We joke about it. And once the abbey was gone and I sat down to think about what one night in Paris could actually be, the joke turned into the plan.

We will be in the Marais for the rest of the week doing Design Week, chasing ateliers and installations and one full day at Maison&Objet. Twenty-four hours on the other side of the river first is not a consolation prize. It is a part of the city I have not spent real time in since I was in school, which means Mabel gets her first proper look at the tower and I get to walk streets I used to know with the eyes I have now. A forced pivot turned into the one thing I would never have scheduled for myself.

The Marais and Saint-Germain are packed that week and priced accordingly. Booking last minute with a budget is a losing game. So I gathered up the leftover points, made a strategy, and let the research do what it does.

Where we are staying

The research led me to a spot that I might not have found in my current research, such a happy accident!

Le Cinq Codet, 5 Rue Louis Codet, on a quiet street four minutes from École Militaire. A 1930s building that used to be a telephone exchange, redone by Jean-Philippe Nuel, which means it has actual bones instead of the applied charm you get when someone crams a boutique hotel into a Haussmannian floor plan. Excellent reviews, a spa with a hammam on a third-floor open-air terrace, and a rate that fit inside my number even during fair week.

Book a category up from the cheapest room. That advice applies to almost every Paris hotel, and it applies here. I booked one of their Duplex Room that has a loft area for the bed and soaring windows.

The rest of this one is for subscribers.
Below the line: where I am eating lunch and the starred alternative I nearly booked instead, the four shops on the leafy streets between Rue du Bac and Rue de Varenne, the doorway four minutes from the Eiffel Tower that nobody stops at, the dinner I chose over the one with the view, and the coffee I am walking to on my way to the fair.
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