2025 france pilgramage roadtrip

backstory - the accidental pilgrim

I'll start by admitting that I was an accidental pilgrim for this journey. This all started when Samantha was accepted to attend a week-long intensive training course in Heidleberg, Germany to help further develop her skills with microscopy image analysis (and in total transparency, I needed her to dumb down her explanation of where she was going so I could explain it). She was accepted into the program and knew she'd need to spend a week in Germany, so when she told Damari and I that she was thinking of spending a few days somewhere in Europe if her trip and work schedule allowed for it we told her that sounded like a great opportunity. It wasn't until a few weeks before the trip that she decided she wanted to visit France, so when she told us that she would head out a week before to do so Damari responded that I had plenty of "use-or-lose" vacation that I need to use and that I'd be happy to accompany her to France, thus beginning the start of our planning for a pilgrimage/road trip.

Samantha and I sat down to buy plane tickets just a few weeks before and then started planning. Samantha is usually the task master amongst the both of us, but her work schedule was busy, so we just talked about places we wanted to visit and said we would figure it out as we went along. It wasn't until the few days before our trip that I started to use AI, specifically Google Gemini, to plan it all out. I just prompted Gemini with the dates, the places we wanted to visit, the fact that we were renting a car, and the type of hotels we wanted to stay in, and just like that the framework of our trip was born, with plenty of suggestions as to where to go and what to do. It easily would have taken days for us to do that level of research, and besides double-checking reviews on my favorite travel site for honest reviews (TripAdvisor), I rented a car, started making hotel reservations, and we suddenly our plan was kicking into action.

Below chronicles our adventures, and links are included for some of the pics and video, as well as for a few of the attractions we took in. I'll try to throw in all of the details for what was a very upliftiing spiritual journey - hope you enjoy!  

Day 3 - lourdes pigrimage

Day 5 - mount saint michel to omaha beach to lisieux

Day 7 - Paris and notre dame

Signing off until the next trip... thanks for reading!